Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c10.12

c10.12

The mention of rock-carvers recalls another debt of Ashoka's to Persian prototypes. From the 7th century B.C., if not earlier, tombs in the likeness of pillared halls had been cut into the cliffs of Media and Persia. In India, the first of a long and distinguished series of rock-cut 'structures' were carved in the time of Ashoka out of the hard gneiss of the Barābar hills, nineteen miles north of Gayā in southern Bihār.¹¹⁵ It is significant that they reproduce wooden buildings: a round hut with a thatched roof, an oblong hall or shrine with a vaulted 'wooden' roof, a monumental doorway imitating bamboo and timber. In other words, the more grandiose Persian idea is adapted to the Indian idiom. At the same time the Persian tradition of polished stonework is faithfully and laboriously followed; the hard granite surface of the interiors of these humble cells has been burnished until it resembles glass or metal. And incidentally the Barābar caves were dedicated by Ashoka to the use of the Ājīvika ascetics, who were rivals to Buddhists and Jainas alike, though with a bias to the latter. The dedication is a tribute to the reality of the tolerance which the Buddhist emperor preached.