Water, Ideology, and Kingship at the Ancient Burmese Capital of Bagan, Myanmar: An Iconographic Analysis of the Nat Yekan Sacred Water Tank
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bagan, the imperial capital of the Burmese Empire (11th–14th centuries CE), was situated in what is now known as Myanmar’s “dry zone”, Southeast Asia’s most arid region. This setting necessitated the development of a subtle, yet extensive rain-fed water management system that channeled water from the Tuyin mountain range in the southeast to the walled and moated royal city in the northwest. Nat Yekan tank, a rock-cut reservoir located on the western edge of the summit of the Thetso–Taung portion of the Tuyin range, played significant utilitarian and spiritual roles in collecting, sacralizing, and then channeling waters down into the vast Mya Kan reservoir, which, in turn, fed the water management system that redistributed this valuable resource across the Bagan plain. The iconographic elements carved into the stone walls of the Nat Yekan tank attest to its spiritual importance and tie it to an ideological program of kingly legitimacy grounded in guarantees of fertility and prosperity for all.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".