107 a memorial service they were dedicated to famous temples and exhibited to the worshipers. The collapse of the Angkor dynasty was mainly due to several fierce wars of attrition with Siam. Yet, there were also certain factors lurking in the social structure of that time, that served to accelerate the collapse. First of all the combatants who were villagers had grown exhausted, due to the fact that they were being summoned to fight wars that extended over several years. Second, within the oligarchic structure, wars of succession and internal conflicts within royal families proved to be negative factors. Third, while on the one hand there were stagnations and deadlocks in Hindu and Mahayana Buddhist ideas as well as their political and social systems, yet a fourth point was the fact that there was a fresh influx of Theravada Buddhism in the villages, that was endowed with a high degree of freedom. It even incorporated the guardian spirits of the land and led to a shift from Mahayana to Theravada Buddhism. Moreover, Groslier’s theory of the non-functionality of irrigation networks, natural disasters (flood legends and so forth), and the theory of Cœdès concerning fatigue caused by the erection of temples and so on, are also insisted upon. Regardless of what the case may be, the collapse of the glorious Angkor dynasty was brought about by the congestion of a variety of factors as listed above, and the final upshot was the doom of the country. The Angkor Capital was discovered within a Dense Forest Those around the royal family who managed to survive abandoned the land of Angkor, and fearing they might be hunted down and killed by the army of Siam they fled to the central region of Cambodia. In 1550, about 120 years after the fall of the Angkor capital, the old capital of Angkor was discovered in the midst of a jungle. “The king of Cambodia at that time went on an elephant hunt deep into a jungle. As his companions were cutting their way through the jungle, they ran into a
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