Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c10.9

c10.9

It is not an exaggeration to say that this Indo-Persian phase marks the beginning of masonry architecture in India. There had of course been stone and brick buildings far back in the 3rd millennium, but little to which, so far as we know, the proud term 'architecture' can fairly be applied. Subsequently to the 3rd millennium, the earliest stone structures in India to which an approximate date can be attached are the remnants of the great defences of Old Rājgir in Bihār. These defences, twenty-five miles in length, enclose the site of the city which was associated in the 6th century B.C. with the Buddha and Mahāvīra during the first formative period of the Buddhist and Jaina faiths.* The work consists of a massive wall, dry-built of large unshapen stones, with square bastions at frequent intervals. These rugged structures, too, can scarcely claim the name of architecture. Nor can those of the early Taxila in the Punjab, visited though it was by Alexander in 326 B.C. There, on what is now the Bhīr Mound, the local king received his Greek visitor and showed him the sights. They were humble enough; the excavator of Taxila, Sir John Marshall, himself admits that at this time the town had 'no architecture worthy of the name'.110 With rare exceptions, its buildings were a rambling conglomeration of ill-aligned and ill-built walls of plastered rubble, resembling rather the slum of a poverty-stricken suburb than the central lay-out of a capital city. Almost the only architectural ‘feature’, if such it may be called, is the occasional use of untidy stone pedestals designed to carry wooden roof-posts. The general culture of the city was of the same inferior order: only at the end of the 4th century, at or shortly after the arrival of Alexander, do considerable hoards of sophisticated jewellery, including three superb gems of Achaemenian workmanship,¹¹¹ enliven the monotony of the scene. It is likely enough that these hoards were either Persian loot brought to Taxila by Alexander’s following, or were otherwise a sequel to the devastation of the Persian empire and the dispersal of Achaemenian craftsmanship.