Indian Painting under the Mughals, A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1750 c13.31.4

c13.31.4

Mathura, a place of great sanctity, which he sacked in the year 1019, he thus describes: ‘This marvellous city encloses more than a thousand structures, the greater number in marble and as firmly established as the faith of the true believers. If we reckon the money which all these monuments must have cost, it will not be too much to estimate it at several millions of dinars, and moreover it must be said that such a city could not be built even in two centuries. In the pagan temples my soldiers found five idols of gold, whose eyes were formed of rubies of the value of 50,000 dinars, another idol wore as an ornament a sapphire, weighing 400 miskals, and the image itself, when melted, yielded 98 miskals of pure gold. We found besides a hundred silver idols representing as many camel loads.’ Mahmud encountered the same wonders in all the cities he passed through. On the expedition which he made in 1024, chiefly for the purpose of destroying the temple of Somnāth in Gujarāt, he found a wonderful religious edifice whose fifty-six pillars were covered with plates of gold and had precious stones scattered all about them; thousands of statues of gold and silver surrounded the sanctuary.