Four Lost Cities

by Annalee Newitz

  Most of the survivors we know about, Tuck said, are liberti. He thinks that’s partly because families fled Pompeii together, including their liberti and slaves. But he also suspects liberti survived because many of them were out of town on business when Vesuvius erupted. It was common for liberti to continue working for their former owners after being set free, and typically they took jobs managing their patrons’ financial interests and agricultural lands outside Pompeii. Tuck said this kind of work arrangement would also explain why so many Pompeii refugees preferred to resettle in cities along the northern coast of the Bay of Naples. This wasn’t just out of convenience. Rich Pompeiian patrons had business assets there, and liberti could continue managing them after their masters had perished.

  Tuck has a favorite Pompeii survivor: a man named Gaius Sulpicius Faustus, a freed slave from a family of bankers who lived at Pompeii. Gaius and the Sulpicii left behind the kind of paper trail that historians dream of discovering. We know they made it out of the city because they dumped a strongbox as they fled, full of records that tied the Sulpicii to a small financial empire that included several warehouses at Puteoli. These were the exact kinds of holdings that a liberti like Gaius might have managed for his patron. In 79, Puteoli was the main harbor in ancient Italy, where large cargo ships unloaded their bulk commodities like marble, timber, grain, and wine. The Sulpicii would have warehoused these items before sending them up to Rome on smaller boats. Gaius’ trail picks up again in the pretty seaside town of Cumae, where Tuck discovered graves bearing the names of several Sulpicii liberti. Tuck figures that Gaius and his family must have continued managing his master’s holdings after the disaster, settling in Cumae because it reminded them of Pompeii. Like Pompeii, Cumae was a commuter town for people who had business in Puteoli. Tuck noted that this pattern was so common because Puteoli was basically a warehouse town, and not a particularly nice place to live.

  The Sulpicii weren’t the only family with this idea. Tuck has found evidence that Titus, and later his brother Emperor Domitian, funded the construction of entire new neighborhoods at Cumae to house refugees, complete with baths, an amphitheater, and temples dedicated to Pompeii’s patron gods Venus and Vulcan. Plus, he commissioned a brand-new road linking the city to the Roman road network. Perhaps not surprisingly, the new neighborhood had a meeting house for Augustales, the liberti’s association. “This wasn’t slave labor that got shipped in, either,” Tuck said. “It meant jobs for local people.” The road was an especially luxurious addition to the city, making it more accessible for trade and tourism from Rome. At Puteoli, the emperor commissioned an amphitheater that was a perfect copy of the Colosseum in Rome. “[The survivors] are getting state-of-the-art facilities,” Tuck marveled. “It’s extraordinary and unprecedented. I imagine people looked at [that amphitheater] and said, ‘We’ve got it as good as Rome.’”

  Though thousands died at Pompeii, it appeared that the Roman government smoothed the way for life to go on for the tens of thousands of refugees in Campania. We can’t assume that everyone got an equal piece of the pie, as most of our records come from the lives of wealthy liberti. But refugees remained together in their new homes, intermarrying and often carrying on the same businesses they had in Pompeii. Few people wrote publicly about the trauma, but they held on to their identities as Pompeiians.

  There was one thing they did discard within one generation, though: their liberti status. All the children of liberti from Pompeii stopped using their parents’ slave names, so nobody in Cumae or Neapolis or Puteoli would know that they were descended from slaves. Instead, the public would know them only as Vettii or Sulpicii, venerable Pompeii families whose fortunes continued to grow with the empire.

  The movement of people from Pompeii to Cumae and Neapolis was very different from the journey back to village life from Çatalhöyük. Though some of Çatalhöyük’s residents probably migrated to other mega-sites like Domuztepe with its Death Pit, most of them rejected high-density urban life in favor of smaller communities. Pompeiians sought out cities very similar to the one they had lost, and Vesuvius’ refugees were able to maintain continuity in their lives despite losing almost everything. This was largely because Rome had colonized the entire area, creating public spaces that were in some ways interchangeable.

  What Pompeiians lost was their city’s hybrid culture, where traditions kept by the native Oscan-speakers mixed with new ideas from Egypt, Carthage, Rome, and dozens of others. Still, as the story of the Sulpicii family makes clear, international trade on the Mediterranean continued. And the city’s middlers gained more social standing than they might have in Pompeii. They shed the memories of slavery, and what their parents endured so their children could be freeborn. It was a determined forgetting that paralleled the way all of Rome tried to forget what happened when the burning ash fell.

  On my last evening in Pompeii, I took a stroll through the city for a few hours before sunset. It’s astonishing how much walking through Pompeii today replicates the experience of living there 2,000 years ago. The streets are crowded with families speaking many languages; children yelp and leap across the fat blocks of the crosswalks; and hot, tired people dunk their heads under the street fountains for relief. It’s easy to imagine the bustling place it once was, full of the smell of sizzling meat, the tang of spilled wine, and the reek of fermented fish sauce—mingled with the stench of the streets, which must have been an unpleasant soup of garbage, wastewater, and poop from every animal in the city (including humans). I made my way from the villas ringing the Forum down Via dell’Abbondanza, the crowds thinning as the sun sank. At last I stood almost alone on a corner near Julia Felix’s insula.

  I took pictures of the chipped marble on a taberna counter as a tourist filled her water bottle from one of the restored public fountains across the street. Built from rough blocks worn smooth by hands, the waist-high square tub caught a steady stream of clean, cold water pouring from the mouth of a pipe. This ancient piece of urban infrastructure went back thousands of years, but was deceptively simple. Its existence depended on a sophisticated idea of public space, and an economic system that provided the rocks, pipes, and city planning. And all that was supported by a political hierarchy that assigned people to different roles according to written and unwritten rules: merchant, slave, aristocrat, wife, patron, prostitute. On the streets of Pompeii we can find a record of those roles changing, but also remaining intact at some fundamental level, like a Roman road that has lasted for millennia beneath six meters of volcanic stone.

  PART THREE

  Angkor

  THE RESERVOIR

  CHAPTER 7

  An Alternate History of Agriculture

  When I arrived in Phnom Penh during Cambodia’s dry season in January, I stumbled through the streets in a jet-lagged daze, barely seeing the dense city around me. My mind was on thousand-year-old Khmer temples, their golden facades crumbling into worn stone blocks and imprisoned by thickly braided tree roots. These structures, from the Khmer Empire’s capital at Angkor, have been synonymous with the myth of lost cities for at least two centuries. You can even find Lara Croft exploring the legendary ruins of the Angkorian temple Ta Prohm in the first Tomb Raider movie. But unlike Roman civilization, Khmer traditions are not lost or dead. The culture that blossomed at Angkor—a form of Theravada Buddhism combined with centralized state power—continues to shape many aspects of Cambodian life today. Once I’d gotten some sleep, I could see it on the streets of Phnom Penh, the city where Khmer royals fled in the 15th century as Angkor fell apart. Today, the nearly 600-year-old capital’s buildings are obscured by tangles of electrical cables instead of tree roots, and fences around modern-day palaces are topped with coiled razor wire so fine it shimmers in the sun like jewels.

  Phnom Penh is joined to Angkor by the Tonle Sap River, which winds north from the modern city before widening into the Tonle Sap Lake that provided the ancient capital’s farms with nourishing floodwaters every year. Eleven hundred years ag
o, Angkor was one of the biggest metropolises in the world, thronging with nearly a million residents, tourists, and pilgrims. When the 13th-century Chinese diplomat Zhou Daguan visited, he described elaborate city walls, breathtaking statues, golden palaces, and vast reservoirs with artificial islands. And yet even as Zhou fought his way through crowded streets to witness the king’s sumptuous processions, the city was pregnant with its own demise. The Khmer kings were losing their hold over the empire’s provincial capitals abroad, and neglecting the city’s crucial water infrastructure at home. Some years, Angkor’s dams burst during rainy season; other years, silt choked the canals and slowed the flow of mountain water to a trickle. And each time this happened, repairs got harder. Farming got harder. Trade slowed down, and political tensions heated up. By the mid-15th century, the city’s population had fallen from hundreds of thousands to mere hundreds.

  Though obvious in retrospect, it was the kind of incremental catastrophe that nobody could recognize until it was too late. That’s what makes Angkor’s abandonment so haunting. On a day-to-day timescale, people living there wouldn’t necessarily have noticed the city’s dramatic transformation. There was no giant sign proclaiming the end of life as they’d known it; instead, there was a mounting pile of annoyances and disappointments. Nobody was fixing the canals, and the reservoirs were flooding. Some of the once-thriving neighborhoods had fallen empty and silent. There were no more fun parades on festival days. Younger generations would realize they had fewer economic opportunities than their elders had. In the 14th century, an Angkorian kid with talent might grow up to become a full-time musician or scholar at court. Or she might have a thriving business selling spices on the heavily trafficked roads to temples at Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom. But by the late 15th century, young Angkorians had few choices. Mostly they grew up to be farmers. Some became priests or monks, tending what remained of the faded temples.

  In the soft apocalypse at Angkor, we can see directly what happens when political instability meets climate catastrophe. It looks chillingly similar to what cities are enduring in the contemporary world. But in the dramatic history of the Khmer culture’s coalescence and survival, we can see something equally powerful: human resilience in the face of profound hardship.

  Jungle farming

  Somehow, Angkor managed to exist at a size bigger than many modern cities for hundreds of years, despite the fact that this region of Cambodia is known for its climate extremes, with rainy season floods and dry season droughts. While their kings waged wars abroad and fought internecine battles in court at home, the Khmer people razed the tropical jungle and replaced it with an orderly city grid, complete with elevated, flood-proof houses and a canal network for drinking water and irrigation. The Khmer built towns, hospitals, and bureaucracies at a rate that would have made Rome’s emperors jealous. How did this medieval civilization thrive in an environment that would be challenging for us even today?

  The answer, say archaeologists, is not that the Khmer were somehow ahead of their time, nor that they were in league with ancient aliens. (Of course there are people who claim that Angkor was built by aliens.1) Instead, it was because Khmer urbanites came from a tradition of tropical city-building that looks very different from what we see in the more northerly regions of the Levant and Europe. For nearly 45,000 years, the Khmer’s ancestors were perfecting the techniques required to build and farm in the jungle, manipulating earth and water to make empires whose remains often melted back into nature, leaving very little trace.

  It probably began with a forest fire. Fifty thousand years ago, humans in Southeast Asia were fanning out across the South Pacific in reed boats, eventually island-hopping all the way down to Australia. During that time, they settled in the lands that would one day belong to the Khmer Empire, as well as on islands that we know today as Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines, and New Guinea. In all these places, bands of roving humans foraged at the edge of dense tropical jungles, living on plants and small animals. At some point, they would have noticed that forest fires had a paradoxical effect. Though initially deadly, the flames also cleared away underbrush and left a layer of charcoal behind. Some of humans’ most beloved foods, like yams and taro, flourished after the jungle had been torched—partly because they had more room to grow, but partly because those charred bits created a more nutrient-rich soil. After observing the benefits of wildfire, says Max Planck Institute archaeologist Patrick Roberts, humans figured out that they could start these fires themselves and reap the benefits.

  Roberts is the author of Tropical Forests in Prehistory, History, and Modernity,2 a fascinating survey of how the equatorial jungles incubated civilizations that looked very different from the ones like Çatalhöyük in the Levant. In areas as far-flung as Southeast Asia and the Amazon, Roberts and his colleagues have found clear evidence that humans set off controlled burns. Sometimes they would work the soil with their hands afterward, mixing in the charcoal along with animal bones and feces to create more fertile ground. Over thousands of years, they learned how to encourage certain trees and plants to grow, scattering seeds from banana trees, sago palms, taro, and other starchy staples, and eventually changing the tree populations of the forests where they foraged. When they paddled between islands, they brought their seeds and burning techniques with them, carrying favored plants and small mammals back to Southeast Asia. From South Asia, they brought chickens down to the South Pacific Islands in boats as well. It wasn’t agriculture exactly—it was more like proto-farming. The groups doing this were probably still nomadic. But even millennia later, scientists can use stratigraphic techniques to see the ways these ancient people altered the jungle. Lower (older) layers are packed with a mix of fossilized pollen and seeds from a naturally occurring mix of plants, but upper layers are full of remains from plants that are noticeably skewed toward crops favored by humans.

  While people were molding bricks to make the first houses at Çatalhöyük, people across the world in the highlands of New Guinea were digging deep trenches to drain a swamp known today as Kuk. The people of Kuk Swamp built elaborate structures to live in, and planted bananas, sugar cane, and taro in the drained farmland they’d created. Their settlement was the culmination of generations of humans working the earth. A landmark paper published by Roberts and his colleagues in 2017 in the scholarly journal Nature Plants sums up: “There is now clear evidence for the use of tropical forests by [humans] in Borneo and Melanesia by c. 45,000 years ago; in South Asia by c. 36,000 years ago; and in South America by c. 13,000 years ago.”3 By the time we reach the Angkorian period, people in Southeast Asia would have had plenty of experience building settlements in an extreme environment.

  Roberts says this doesn’t mean tropical urbanites somehow “beat” more northerly communities in the race to build cities. “Clearly, urbanism is different in different parts of the world,” he told me. “We need to be more flexible in how we define this.” Cities aren’t made of the same materials throughout the world, nor do they have the same design. Roberts continued, “The tropics demonstrate that where we draw the lines of agriculture and urbanism can be very difficult to determine.” This has sometimes made it hard for archaeologists to identify urban remains that aren’t as recognizable as stone walls and figurines. To find early cities in Southeast Asia, scientists look for what they call “anthropogenic geomorphology.” (To break down all those Greek roots, anthropogenic means human-caused and geomorphology means the study of earth-shaping.) The term encompasses all the ways that humans have sculpted the land for their own uses, from planting trees and mixing fertilizer into the soil to draining swamps and building artificial hills as foundations for wooden huts.

  Understanding the ancient origins of anthropogenic geomorphology is key for recognizing the remains of cities like Angkor, where only a tiny fraction of the urban grid was made from stone. The cities that arose out of the long history of tropical agriculture weren’t high-density clusters of stone buildings ringed by farms like Çatalhöyük
or Pompeii. Instead, they were low-density sprawl that incorporated large swatches of farmland into the urban fabric. Homes and public dwellings were made from earth and perishable plant materials. Though impressive, these urban features quickly returned to wilderness after people had abandoned them. When European archaeologists first visited Angkor, they were conditioned to look for Western modes of urban development, and thus the vast majority of homes in the city remained invisible to them. They made a beeline for the stone towers of Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom, mistaking these temple complexes for small walled cities, instead of walled compounds within a massive urban sprawl. They completely missed the once-packed neighborhoods, reservoirs, and farms that had left their marks on the land for acres around.

  Everything is better with lasers

  It became very obvious to me how archaeologists could make that mistake when I visited Sambor Prei Kuk, once the crowded capital city of the seventh-century Chenla Empire in Cambodia. Now all I could see were a few scattered temple towers and a 1,300-year-old wall that looked like a hill covered with underbrush. Sitting on a broad rock and looking around, I couldn’t imagine these crumbling structures as part of a metropolis. And yet Sambor Prei Kuk, with its Hindu temples and large reservoir, was in many ways the prototype for Angkor. Shaded by the trees that give this place its name—Sambor Prei Kuk is Khmer for “the temple in the richness of the forest”—I pored over maps of the area with archaeologist Damian Evans. “There was a huge wooden city here once,” Evans said, waving his arm in the direction of a small dirt road paved in fallen leaves. “Once it rotted away, what remained were moats and ramparts and mounds.” That’s what he’s got on his map, which shows the ground elevations around us in granular detail.