The Search for Nothing

Posted on May 8, 2015 by Nick O'Brien

The Khmer Rouge exploded on Cambodian culture like a nuclear bomb. Twenty years of freedom from France had created a bohemian pearl on the Mekong river. Film, music, art, all thrived under the mercurial playboy, Prince Norodom Sihanouk – nurturing them slowly back to life after a hundred years of French imperialism.

April, 1975. Saigon will fall shortly, ending the Vietnam War. In neighboring Cambodia, the instability caused by the withdrawal of the U.S. forces has allowed North Vietnamese-backed Cambodian communists to swarm into the capitol of Phnom Penh. Initially greeted as liberators, these ‘Red Khmer’ or Khmer Rouge, soon shocked the country and then the world with their wanton brutality and reductionist policies.

The basic underlying concept of Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot’s ideology was destruction. The destruction of the ‘Old’. Old ways, old religion, old monuments – and the rebirth of the ‘New People’.

Like most psuedo-Communist leaders, he felt that his people’s history and culture had been corrupted by foreign influence, hijacked and rewritten. He sought to reset the clock. Over the next twenty years, the Khmer Rouge would systematically engage in a decimation of it’s own people, and their history. A sadistic effort to turn the country back to an idealized ‘Year Zero’.

The Zero

The absence of things. It’s an interesting concept.

The mathematical idea of of a numeral signifying nothingness was a giant leap. The ability to algebraically define negative numbers and the introduction of the base 10 number system (which we use today) took mathematics from the Dark Ages into the Renaissance.

Up until 1931 the concept was always believed to be an Arab or Indian invention. The oldest recorded zero, a small dot on a wall in Gwalior, India, dates to the 9th century. This was widely accepted until a French archaeologist named Cœodès, working in northeastern Cambodia, unearthed a stone tablet at an ancient site called Sambor PreyKuk. Of a hundred rubbings taken from the dig, one in particular, tagged with the eye-catching moniker ‘K-127’, contained what appeared to be a perfectly etched dot between two ancient Khmer numbers.

Now a dusty town in a country filled with dusty towns, the temple fields of the ancient Chenla capitol predate the massive limestone edifices of Angkor Wat by hundreds of years. Simple brick structures, some five story’s tall, they still dot the jungle. Standing silent in the forests, their intricate veneers wear the scars of a millennia and a half of warfare.

AK-47 Bullet Holes – Sambor PreyKuk, Cambodia Photo:Cassie Wilkins

Spears and arrows gave way to high explosives during the Vietnam War, with American B-52 bombers carpeting the area numerous times – shattering many of the huge temples.

Sambor PreyKuk, Cambodia. Photo: Cassie Wilkins

The destruction wrought first by the US bombers, then by the Khmer Rouge, forced local conservationists to bundle away the most valuable of their treasures, including K-127, eventually transporting them in secret to the sprawling Angkor Conservation Area in Siem Reap.

The Khmer Rouge soon began a total sweep of all cultural and religious icons, to be smashed, burned, or blown to pieces. Temples that had taken hundreds of years to build, and stood for another thousand, were razed in mere seconds using dynamite. The rest were left to be reclaimed by the jungle.

Sambor PreyKuk, Cambodia

In the end, people were far easier to destroy than buildings of brick and stone.

Those that had studied anything, let alone their own history, were put to death. In the new agrarian society there was seen as no need for those educated classes that can cause so much trouble to a repressive dictatorship. The historians and archeologists, who had just begun to unravel the mysteries of this wonderful civilization hidden deep in the jungle, were either worked to death or killed outright. Often simply wearing eyeglasses was enough.

Victims of S-21 Prison, Phnom Penh, Cambodia. 17,000 walked in, 7 walked out.

The twenty year history of the Khmer Rouge is but a small chink in a two thousand year old culture, but much of the damage done is permanent. Many of the secrets held safe by the stones, and the monks that watched over them, are gone.

Conservationists began the slow process of piecing things back together in 1989. Despite the Khmer Rouge still controlling fierce pockets of the country, the King requested the UN to step in and oversee the reconstruction of not only a shattered country, but it’s history as well.

Two decades of reconstruction and foreign development and things in the Kingdom are far less chaotic. NGO’s and foreign researchers have taken advantage of the relative stability, picking up archaeological digs where they left off in the 60’s.

One historian, Amir Aczel, was given a grant to research the whereabouts of the famed K-127 tablet, believed to have been one of the pieces stashed away from the advancing communists. Like looking for a needle in a stack of needles, he began the arduous task of sorting through the thousands upon thousands of shattered icons and smashed tablets that await restoration in the fields of the Angkor Archaeological Zone.

In the eighty-years since Cœodès took his simple charcoal rubbing, archaeologists had poured over the etchings of K-127, finally deciphering it’s important meaning.

‘Chaka parigraha 605 pankami roc’

Translation: ‘The Chaka era has reached 605 on the fifth day of the waning moon’

Since the ‘Chaka’ period was known from other texts to have begun in 78AD, simple math placed the Sambor ‘Zero’ at 683AD, a full two hundred years before the Gwalior ‘Zero’. The value of K-127 historically is instantly bumped into the realm of the Aztec Calendar or Magna Carta.

Aczel, rummaging through the piles of broken stones, painstakingly scans each shattered limestone tablet, day after day. The detritus of a cultural genocide, the fields are littered with the remnants of some of the 10,000 relics believed to have been destroyed.

There, in this pile of nothing, Aczel uncovers a familiar sight. Known only from a grainy charcoal rubbing, the image has nevertheless been etched into his memory, poured over, day in and day out.

‘K-127’, still bearing it’s faded paper tag attached by Cœodès over eighty years ago. It’s small, unassuming dot bringing the mantle of historical achievement back to the country that deserved it, yet tried so hard to forget it.