The Antiquities of Orissa v1.c7.321

Language: English

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The same may be said of Assyria and Persia, but with some reservations. The conical battlements of Assyrian towers are reproduced in a few of the bas-reliefs of Sāñci, and the triple-step battlements of the Palaces of Assyria occur in some bas-reliefs of Khaṇḍagiri and Sāñci; on several towers at the latter place a fourth step is added to the battlements as shown on the margin (Figs. 1 & 2); but both these features are so simple that they cannot be taken as worth anything as tests. Two ashlers put slanting towards each other, produce a triangular figure, and three ashlers of different sizes put one upon another, Figs. 3 & 4, produce the other; and children, playing with German toy bricks, produce them without any great effort of the inventive faculty. This remark would apply to the chevron and the cross-lined check mouldings, (Figs. 3 and 4); as also to the beading round the necks of Asoka's pillars, for no ornament suggests itself more readily than a band of beads round the neck. The interlacing circular moulding observable in Assyrian architecture (Fig. 5) occurs repeatedly on the temple of Bhuvan-eśvara, but the nature of the ornament is not such as to warrant any conclusion as to its origin. A wavy line is a figure which results almost instinctively when a pencil is at play in the hand of a boy, and another to interlace it requires but very little exertion of the imagination. Some of the pateras also are similar (Fig. 6);

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but the similitude is such as must result from the attempt of any primitive nation to delineate flowers by ranging four or more petals round a central dot. Certain it is that all these patterns may be seen very neatly carved on the hafts of hatchets from Polynesia where Assyrian art-influence could not have been other than *nil*. The drooping foliations of the capitals are more complicated; and they certainly belong in common both to the Aśoka and Assyrian pillars. To an Indian they appear very like the pendant filaments of the lotus after the petals have been removed from the receptacle, or the reverted petals of a lotus bud; forms which are peculiarly ornamental and beautiful, and which have been employed in India as ornaments in a variety of ways, and in different places. It would not be safe, therefore, to take them as conclusive. The so-called honey-suckle and lotus ornament, which is common both to the Aśoka pillars and Assyria, might not at first sight appear to be so readily disposed of. With the people of this country the upright buds may well pass for spikenards, or flowers of the turmeric, or the spathes of the *Nilakaṇṭha*, a beautiful deep purple flowering plant of the zingiber tribe quite common in India, and the open petalled flower with buds, the Mucukunda (*Pterospermum acerifolium*);

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the uprights are as unlike lotus buds or half-blown flowers as they well can be, and the intermediate buds with four dots not at all like honey-suckle buds: We take the open petals to be bunches of slender leaves tied together. But whatever they be, they are so peculiar that an imitation on the one side or the other may be readily assumed, and if this be assumed the whole capital, and even the battlements and the mouldings, might be taken to be Assyrian, though logically we cannot admit that the cumulative effect of a number of individually weak and scarcely tenable arguments, is conclusive by any means: the imposing chain of circumstantial evidence, which in sensational novels plays so exciting a part, invariably breaks down under the first stroke of the hammer of truth. But even admitting to the full extent their force, the similitudes do not by any means suffice to settle the date of Indian stone architecture—much less to affiliate it to the Grecians of Bactria. The relation of the Indo-Aryans with Assyrians, dates from a much earlier epoch than B. C. 250, and it is possible, though in the absence of proof not very probable, that the two nations did borrow from each other many elements and requirements [18] of civilization; but no deductions about the age of Indian architecture from the similitude of particular ornaments can be reasonable or safe.

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Of course, if it could be established beyond a doubt that the Indo-Aryans had no stone architecture of their own down to a particular period, and that that period was later than the time when they came in contact with the Assyrians, it could be argued that they had taken the art from the latter; but in such a case it would be natural to expect that the early Indian style should bear a close resemblance to the Assyrian. It is to be regretted that sufficient materials are not at hand for a thorough comparison of the styles of the two nations; but from what we have, it is clear that one of them is not a copy of the other. Most of the doors of Assyrian palaces and of some of their fortresses were rounded on the top; but none were so in India. Indian upper roofs were mostly slanting or curvilinear; those of Assyria flat. The cornices of the two were alike, and supported on corbels; but their styles were entirely different. The pilasters and pillars as seen at Khaṇḍagiri and in the Sāñci bas-reliefs, are, likewise, different from anything of the kind figured by Layard, Botta, or Fergusson. The verandas and balconies shown in Indian bas-reliefs have not their counterparts in Assyria; and the pointed horse-shoe pediments which formerly surmounted Indian buildings, and were so peculiarly characteristic, are absent in Assyrian and Persian buildings. To make this clear we place on the margin the figure of an Indian stronghold taken from the Sāñci bas-reliefs,¹⁶ (Fig.

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8), beside one from Layard’s Nineveh, (Fig. 7) ¹⁷ and a glance at them will, we believe, demonstrate that their styles are independent of each other; at any rate their resemblance, whatever they are, are by no means such as to warrant the deduction of one of them being in any way