The Khmer Empire of Angkor

The Khmer Empire, with its capital at Angkor in present-day Cambodia, was one of the most powerful states of mainland Southeast Asia, flourishing roughly between the ninth and fifteenth centuries CE. Jayavarman II is traditionally regarded as its founder, having proclaimed himself "devaraja" (god-king) around 802 CE in a ritual ceremony that established a symbolic identification between the Khmer monarch and Hindu deities, principally Shiva, legitimizing his absolute authority. The empire developed an agricultural economy based on sophisticated hydraulic irrigation, including large artificial reservoirs (barays) that enabled intensive rice cultivation and sustained a population that, at Angkor's height between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, may have numbered in the hundreds of thousands — potentially the largest pre-industrial settlement in the world by territorial extent.