Ancient City of Angkor

Drought Led to Demise of Ancient City of Angkor - Yahoo! News:

Drought Led to Demise of Ancient City of Angkor
By Charles Choi | LiveScience.com – 21 hrs ago

 The ancient city of Angkor — the most famous monument of which is the breathtaking ruined temple of Angkor Wat — might have collapsed due to valiant but ultimately failed efforts to battle drought, scientists find.

The great city of Angkor in Cambodia, first established in the ninth century, was the capital of the Khmer Empire, the major player in southeast Asia for nearly five centuries. It stretched over more than 385 square miles (1,000 square kilometers), making it the most extensive urban complex of the preindustrial world. In comparison, Philadelphia covers 135 square miles (350 sq. km), while Phoenix sprawls across more than 500 square miles (1,300 sq. km), not including the huge suburbs.

Suggested causes for the fall of the Khmer Empire in the late 14th to early 15th centuries have included war and land overexploitation. However, recent evidence suggests that prolonged droughts might have been linked to the decline of Angkor — for instance, tree rings from Vietnam suggest the region experienced long spans of drought interspersed with unusually heavy rainfall.
Angkor possessed a complex network of channels, moats, and embankments and reservoirs known as barays to collect and store water from the summer monsoons for use in rice paddy fields in case of drought. To learn more about how the Khmer managed their water, scientists analyzed a 6-foot (2-meter)-long core sample of sediment taken from the southwest corner of the largest Khmer reservoir, the West Baray, which could hold 1.87 billion cubic feet (53 million cubic meters) of water, more than 20 times the amount of stone making up the Great Pyramid at Giza.
Also, to collect samples from across the greater Angkor region, researcher Mary Beth Day, a paleolimnologist at the University of Cambridge in England, hired a "tuk-tuk" (motorized rickshaw) driver, and was able to convince him to drive her around the countryside, "often on tracks that tuk-tuks probably aren't designed to travel on," she recalled. "We nearly got stuck in the sand a couple of times, but my driver was remarkably accommodating given that he probably thought I was crazy."
The researchers deduced a 1,000-year-long climate history of Angkor from the baray. They found at around the time Angkor collapsed the rate at which sediment was deposited in the baray dropped to one-tenth of what it was before, suggesting that water levels fell dramatically as well. The discovery "really emphasizes how significant the events during this period must have been," Day said.
As both water levels and sediment deposits ebbed, the ecology of the baray changed as well, with more bottom-dwelling algae and floating plants coming into existence.
"The ecological shift primarily serves to underline how environmental conditions in the West Baray have been fundamentally different since the 17th century, post-collapse, as compared to what the baray was like during Angkorian times," Day said.
In the end, the water management systems of the Khmer might have been insufficient to cope with sudden and intense variations in climate. [10 Ways Weather Changed History]
"Angkor can be an example of how technology isn't always sufficient to prevent major collapse during times of severe instability," Day told LiveScience. "Angkor had a highly sophisticated water management infrastructure, but this technologic advantage was not enough to prevent its collapse in the face of extreme environmental conditions."
"It's important to understand, however, that failure of the water management network was not the sole reason for the downfall of the Khmer Empire," Day added. "The collapse of Angkor was a complex process brought about by several different factors — social, political and environmental."
The scientists detailed their findings online Jan. 2 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Source for Article: http://news.yahoo.com/drought-led-demise-ancient-city-angkor-142407479.html

Kublai Khan’s 13th-century “lost fleet”

Archeologists believe shipwreck found off Japan belongs to Kublai Khan’s 13th-century “lost fleet” | The Envoy - Yahoo! News:

Archeologists believe shipwreck found off Japan belongs to Kublai Khan’s 13th-century “lost fleet”

By Laura Rozen | The Envoy – 13 hrs ago

(Via CNN)

Marine archeologists say that the ancient wreckage of a ship discovered in the seabed off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan, belongs to the ancient "lost fleet" of ships belonging to China's 13th century Mongol ruler Kublai Khan, CNN reports.

Explorers found the 20-meter-long shipwreck by using ultra-sound equipment some 25 meters off the coast of Nagasaki. The team of researchers buried the ultra-sound sensors about a meter deep in the sandy earth beneath the sea. Archeologists believe the ship dates back to 1281, and was part of a 4,400-vessel fleet that China's Mongol rulers during the Yuan Dynasty had employed as an invasion force.

The discovery of the ship's well preserved and mostly intact 12-meter-long keel "could go a long way to helping researchers identify all the characteristics of the 20-meter warship," CNN reported, citing the head of the research team that made the discovery.

"This discovery was of major importance for our research," Yoshifumi Ikeda, of Okinawa's University of the Ryukyus, said at a recent press conference in Nagasaki, according to the CNN report. "We are planning to expand search efforts and find further information that can help us restore the whole ship."

According to Japanese legend, two typhoons--known as the Kamikaze--that occurred seven years apart in the 13th century twice saved Japan from Mongol invasion by "destroy[ing] two separate Mongol invasions fleets so large they were not eclipsed until the D-Day landings of World War II," CNN reported. China was not so spared, however, and was ruled by the Mongol Yuan Dynasty from 1271-1368.

"According to a contemporary account cited in the book Khubilai Khan's Lost fleet: In Search of a Legendary Armada," by maritime archaeologist James P. Delgado, the typhoon's destruction of the over 4,000-vessel Yuan Dynasty invasion fleet created such a vast quantity of material wreckage "that 'a person could walk across from one point of land to another on a mass of wreckage,'" CNN reported.

The wooden-planked ship, originally believed to have been painted light gray, is among "more than 4,000 artifacts, including ceramic shards, bricks used for ballast, cannonballs and stone anchors [that] have been found in the vicinity of the wreck, linking it to the Yuan Dynasty invasion fleet," CNN reported.

Article found at: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/envoy/archeologists-believe-shipwreck-found-off-japan-belongs-kublai-145206810.html

California researcher cracks secret society’s cipher | The Lookout - Yahoo! News

California researcher cracks secret society’s cipher | The Lookout - Yahoo! News:

California researcher cracks secret society’s cipher

By Liz Goodwin | The Lookout – 13 hrs ago

The beginning of the cipher, uncoded (ACL)

A computer scientist at the University of Southern California and two Swedish linguists have cracked a 75,000-character cipher from the 18th century that described the laws of a secret society.

The "Copiale Cipher" was neatly hand-written in Greek and Roman characters with some unknown symbols thrown into the mix. Researchers suspected that the original language was German, since the manuscript was found in Berlin, but they tried to match the manuscript with dozens of languages by running different "computer attacks" on the code, all to no avail.

As they explain in their paper, the researchers' first theory was that the Roman letters contained the true message, with all the other characters serving as distractions, or "nulls." It turned out their hypothesis was completely wrong. After running the cipher through the computer program, the researchers realized that their assumption was backwards--that the Roman characters were, in fact, the nulls.

Even after the code-breakers found and translated most of the unknown characters into letters, a handful of symbols remained mysterious. The researchers believe that these symbols stand for top-secret people in the society.

The manuscript described how to initiate new members into the society and other rules.

Computer scientist Kevin Knight of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering told Science Daily that the secret society members shared a fascination with eye surgery. Other possible affiliations shared among the code-sharing knowledge elite remain speculative, however. "Historians believe that secret societies have had a role in revolutions, but all that is yet to be worked out," Knight said. "And a big part of the reason is because so many documents are enciphered."

There's been a bit of a run lately in claims to break prominent and/or notorious ciphers. In July, an amateur code-breaker claimed to have cracked the messages of the "Zodiac Killer."

Article found at: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/california-researchers-crack-secret-society-cipher-142752408.html