The Age of the Imperial Guptas c8.2

c8.2

Specimens of civil and domestic architecture of the period are still very rare, in spite of the excavations carried on by the Indian Archæological Department at Rājagṛiha, Pāṭaliputra, Vaiśālī, Benares, Bhiṭā, Kosām, and Kurukṣetra. Marshall’s dating of the buildings at Bhiṭā is very appealing but totally unscientific. The assignment of such early dates to a building simply because a single seal or stone-axe was found in a chamber is unconvincing. The amount of material discovered by the late Drs. Bloch and Spooner at Vaiśālī prove that the chamber in which the seals were discovered belong to the Gupta period along with the connected buildings of the same series and stratum, but nothing is left of such buildings today and even the bricks of the walls excavated have been carried away. Similarly, the Gupta structures discovered by Spooner in the uppermost stratum of his excavations at Pāṭaliputra have also disappeared. Even when they were just unearthed they conveyed very little to the student of the history of our architecture.