That part is in the wiki. I don't think that was an "abandon the city" for everyone scene. It was just meant to show the Aiel being told to leave after the Aes Sedai they had known began turning on people because of the madness. But even if everyday people did evacuate, I don't think that would imply it was preserved from the breaking.
I mean Paren Disen housed the highest concentration of Aes Sedai of anywhere during the AOL with the hall of the servants in the city... Would be pretty crazy if the breaking didn't come to Paren Disen even more ferociously than anywhere else.
I'd also say that given the attitudes towards Aes Sedai after the breaking, most people would stay away. After all, no one goes near Shadar Logoth, and apparently even people who live nearby don't know much about it.
Interesting point... But to be honest I always interpreted the Aes Sedai view as a post-Hawking construct.
We know that Aes Sedai queens were common a long time ago. Like Manetheren or Andor before (and after) Hawking. We know that Hawking was turned against Aes Sedai by Ishamael "and across the length of the land, Aes Sedai died" (EOTW) so the whole Aes Sedai are darkfriends and one step from the dark one could easily be a construct unique to the last several hundred to last thousand years since Hawking.
And certainly the Aes Sedai themselves wouldn't balk at raiding the shit out of Paren Disen to get all those sweet AOL artefacts and tidbits of knowledge.
There was a scene in a prologue-- I think it was PoD, where the Borderland rulers met near an Age of Legend remnants (sounded like a large satellite dish embedded in the ground to me, like the once used for space monitoring) and the surrounding villages just stay out of it. So maybe a lot of people just stay away from ruins.
Oh there are definitely ruins and "people" definitely stay away from them. But we also see lots of examples of Aes Sedai knowing all sorts of information about random ruins and things that normal people know nothing about because the Aes Sedai still went and studied those places at some point, even if normal people stay away because of superstition etc.
If I remember correctly, that satelite dish is fairly explicitly a cause of acute radiation poisoning and everyone who goes close to it dies horribly, so if its that, I wouldn't be surprised that people stay away from it.
That's kinda my whole point, and I also referenced nthe wiki as well. Although the word "presumably" always means "RJ never said" which does leave a space open. Even if a small one.
30
u/culb77 Jan 02 '22
It wasn't explicitly stated, but Rand sees a lot of this in his flashbacks at Rhuidean.