Overview

The Hydraulic Kingdom: A Complete History of the Khmer Empire The Khmer Empire stands as one of the most extraordinary civilizations in human history - a hydraulic state that sustained nearly a million people on the Cambodian plain, built the largest religious monument in the world, and left an architectural, linguistic, and cultural legacy that continues to shape mainland Southeast Asia to the present day. From the founding ceremony on Mount Mahendraparvata in 802 CE through the sack of Angkor in 1431 and the complex transformations of the post-Angkorian world, this comprehensive history traces every dimension of the empire's remarkable story. Drawing on the latest geoarchaeological research, the inscriptional record, the observations of the Chinese diplomat Zhou Daguan, and the findings of the Greater Angkor Project, this book examines not only the temple mountains and the divine kings but the hydraulic engineering genius, the social hierarchies, the enslaved labor, the market women, the fermented fish paste, and the classical dancers whose embodied knowledge survives to the present day. It explores the devaraja ideology and the bodhisattva revolution of Jayavarman VII, the environmental crisis that silted the great barays, and the Theravada transformation that dissolved the institutional foundations of the imperial state. Equal parts architectural history, environmental study, social analysis, and civilizational biography, this is the definitive account of the world that built Angkor Wat - and what its rise, transformation, and endurance tell us about the possibilities and limits of human achievement.

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Gearóid Sullivan is an Irish historian and independent scholar specializing in narrative nonfiction and the history of ancient and medieval civilizations. Born and raised in Ireland, he now lives in New Zealand, where he writes large-scale scholarly narratives that bring the complexity of pre-modern societies to a broad readership without sacrificing intellectual rigour or historical depth. Sullivan's work spans an unusually wide range of periods and geographies, encompassing ancient Mesopotamia, medieval Central Asia, the civilizations of the Indian subcontinent, the history of the Silk Road world, and the pre-Columbian Americas, alongside sustained engagement with the history of Southeast Asia. His approach combines close attention to the primary source record with the findings of contemporary archaeology, palaeoclimatology, and geoarchaeological research, producing histories that are as much concerned with the environmental and social dimensions of the past as with its political and military narratives. He is particularly drawn to civilizations that achieved extraordinary things under extraordinary constraints, and to the question of what the most ambitious human experiments in statecraft, engineering, and cultural production can teach us about both the possibilities and the limits of organized human life.

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