Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c9.14

c9.14

2. *Slabbed cists* of granite or laterite, also within a stone circle, are oblong and about six feet in length and height. The eastern upright is normally pierced with a 'port-hole' which may be either circular with a diameter of four to twenty inches, or trapezoidal, or semicircular and cut into the upper edge of the slab immediately below the capstone; the hole was evidently designed for the insertion of bones and offerings. Excavated examples at Brahmagiri, northern Mysore, showed that the cists were sunk to half their height below the surface and were surrounded at the old ground-level by dry-stone walling. Their port-holes were closed by an additional external slab and were approached from the outside by a lined passage which had been blocked when the tomb was sealed. In the cists were pots and iron objects with the fragmentary skeletons of a number of individuals. Comparable cists at Suttukeni, near Pondicherry, had a simpler surround and minute, non-functional port-holes; typologically they may be thought to be later than the Brahmagiri series. In Pudukkottai, south of Madras, laterite cists with port-holes are approached through a slabbed ante-chamber as large as the main cist, and are sometimes called ‘transepted cists’. Generally, it may be affirmed that a cist was finally covered up to or even above the capstone by a barrow or cairn, circular on plan and generally outlined by stone blocks or slabs. According to local custom or the nature of the subsoil, the cist may be built on the natural surface, or partially or completely sunk below the natural surface. Thus in the Hyderabad region they are often deeply buried; the Brahmagiri cists were half-buried; whilst in a large megalith cemetery in the jungle near Savandurg, twenty-two miles west-south-west of Bangalore, there are free-standing port-holed ‘dolmens’ intermingled with identical port-holed cists at all stages of submersion below the natural surface down to capstone level.