The Antiquities of Orissa v2.c18.22

v2.c18.22

**Great Temple—its courtyard.** Of the twenty-eight minor temples noticed by Abul Fazl there is no trace left now; and of the great temple itself, there is but a small remnant. The height of the enclosing wall as given by him is palpably wrong; no enclosing wall that I have ever seen or read of rose to the stupendous height of hundred and fifty cubits. The wall is no longer existent; but from the remains of the trenches formed by those who dug out and carried away the stones from its foundation, I calculate its thickness to have been about 7 or 8 feet; and judging from that I believe the height of the wall was under 25 feet. I noticed a few of the battlements which originally capped the wall and are now lying about here and there, and they measured twenty-two inches in height with a thickness of about 16 inches. They had been evidently set up along the outer edge of the wall, leaving a broad berm behind for soldiers to walk about and defend the temple from outside attack. They are of identically the same shape and size as those of the battlements on the eastern and the southern sides of the Puri enclosure ( Plates LII, LIII ), and people say that the latter were brought from Koṇārak and set up when the Puri temple was repaired in the early part of the last century. This identity of shape and size, coupled with the fact already noticed ( p. [113] ) that these eastern and the southern battlements are different from those that occur on the western and the northern sides and which are older and smaller, fully bear out the tradition.