The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c7.6

c7.6

*The Great Sânchî Stûpa.* — The numerous ruins which are scattered over the environs of the village of Sânchî-Kânâ-keda (in Sanskrit Kâkanâda), near to Bhilsa, are situated right in the heart of Central India, on the ancient commercial highway between Pâtaliputra (Πατλίβοθρα, Patna), the capital of the Maurya emperors, and Bharukaccha (Βαρύγαζα, Bharotch or Broach) by way of Ujjayinî (Ὀζήνη, Ujjain). Sânchî has now become a station of the Indian Midland Railway, and the expresses stop there by request to set down a few tourists. But it is doubtless to the abandonment of the ancient route and to the subsequent thinning of the population that the ancient Buddhist sanctuaries with which the rocky hill is crowned have owed their exceptional escape from the fanaticism of the Musalman invaders as well as the cupidity of the modern Hindus. Whilst at 300 kilometres to the North-East the contemporary and quite analogous stûpa of Barhut, with which we shall so often have to compare it, had been three parts destroyed by the villagers of the neighbourhood, who made a business of exploiting it, the principal monument at Sânchî was still in an excellent state of preservation when it was visited for the first time, in 1818, by General Taylor and described in 1819 by Captain Fell. In compensation, it had much to suffer three years later from the brutal excavations inflicted upon it, without mercy for art and without profit to science, by some English amateurs (¹). From 1881 to 1883 the Archæological Department exerted itself to repair as well as possible this grievous devastation. They closed up the enormous, gaping breach, which had been made in one third of the central dome, under pretext of ascertaining whether it were solid or hollow; they reërected (placing, it is true, several of the lintels so as to face backwards and overlooking in the debris some fragments of the jambs) the southern and western gates, the second of which had fallen only under the weight of the rubbish thoughtlessly thrown upon it; finally, with a zeal almost excessive, they cleared the whole site, without sparing a single tree. Fig. 1 in pl. VII, a kind of horseback view taken from the east in the rising sun, will explain to you better than long descriptions the state and general aspect of the building (²).