The Antiquities of Orissa v2.c16.s2.123

v2.c16.s2.123

As regards architecture, columns, cornices, and mouldings are, I believe, the principal features which determine the style of buildings in Europe, and in Grecian architecture they were the most remarkable. Now in Greek buildings the most prominent characteristics are their inimitable columns. These are entirely wanting in Udayagiri, where their place is occupied by heavy, square pillars, and in Khaṇḍagiri the only specimen available (*ante* p. [ 35 ]) is as unlike a Greek column as one column can be to another. In Greece, flat pilasters were extensively used ; so were they at Udayagiri ; but he would be a highly imaginative man who could spy in the pilasters and pillars shown on plate XXIV any reminiscence of Greek art. Cornices the caves have none which could be for a moment compared to Greek specimens of that member of [ 43 ] buildings. The pyramidal battlements and the horse-shoe dormer wind ows of the Udayagiri bas-reliefs were unknown to the builders of the Parthenon. Dormers form a peculier feature of mediæval European architecture, but were unknown to classical builders, and if this fact would justify our supposing the Udyagiri, Sāñchī, and Barāhat dormers, (or more strictly speaking, balconies, for they are not true dormers) to be due to the influence of Saxon builders, I shall gladly renounce my theory of their pre-Christian antiquity.