Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c10.16

c10.16

Of the splendour that was Pāṭaliputra little is known today in material form, but that little is precisely what we have been led to expect.¹¹⁸ As long ago as 1896 a summary excavation brought to light a column-capital of a familiar Achaemenid pattern. It has the stepped impost, side-volutes and central palmettes of its Persian prototypes, and its design if not its execution is attributable to an early phase of the transplanted Achaemenid craftsmanship. Two stone legs of a throne of Persian type were also found. Subsequently, in 1912, a more ambitious but still very incomplete excavation seems to have uncovered some part of a large pillared hall, represented by an unframed cluster of some eighty monolithic columns showing the Persian polish. In front of them is a row of massive timber rafts, presumably designed to carry a platform or monumental staircase over the unstable subsoil. Inadequate though the evidence be, it is tolerably clear that we have here a Persian *diwan* or *apadana* or audience-hall, and that we are confronted once more with a deliberate 'Persianization' that bespeaks the presence of imported ideas and imported master-masons.