Indian Art: A History of Indian Art from the Earliest Times up to the Third Century A.D. c11.8

c11.8

THE ASSEMBLY HALL—The asrembly hall discovered at Kumrahar was a mighty and imposing structure without parallel in Indian art. The building consisted of 80 pillars arranged in 8 rows of 10 each aligned east-west with two extra pillars at the eastern end most probably to accommodate the royal throne. The pillars have been found in a miserably broken condition due to the action of fire but the remains help us to reconstruct a fairly good picture of the original building. Each pillar stood exactly 15 ft. apart from the other. None of the columns had any pedestals and the pillars rested directly on the floor of the hall which together with the roof seems to be a timber construction of maximum finish and grandiose execution, as shown by the surviving seven wooden platforms of great neatness and accuracy still found in marvellous preservation. Three bigger fragments of the pillars were exposed; but a fourth one 14 ft. 3 in. in height was almost the pillar with only its top missing, the probable total height was about 21 ft. and the girth as well as the shaft which is smooth and polished right down to the base are like those of an Aśokan pillar. In some of the top-fragments there are socket holes for metal bolts to hold the super-structure which show signs of burstings due to fire action. Under the bottom of each pillar was found a circle of deep ashes, pointing to the hypothesis that each pillar was erected on a wooden basement embedded in the earth. [Fig. 45.]