The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c33.13

v1.c33.13

As it happens, it is the earliest monuments that have proved the greatest stumbling-block. Yet the fallacies, which have grown up around them, are not difficult to correct. They arise, in a great measure, from the tendency, common in all ages, to magnify the exploits of great heroes, and to ascribe to them feats and achievements in which they bore no part. What happened in this respect to Alexander, to King Arthur, or to Charlemagne, happened also to the Emperor Açoka. In ancient days his name became the centre of a cycle of heroic legends, and the same process of glorification has continued in modern times by fathering on to him a multitude of works with which he had no connexion. The monuments that can with relative certainty be assigned to the Maurya age, or to the age immediately succeeding it, are few. Besides the brick buildings referred to above they comprise the following: a series of isolated columns erected by the Emperor Açoka at various spots in Northern India; the remains of a pillared hall at Patna, which probably formed part of a royal palace designed, perhaps, on the model of the Achaemenian palaces of Persia; a group of rock-cut shrines in the Barābar hills in Bihār; a small monolithic rail at Sārnāth; a throne in the interior of the temple at Buddh Gayā; some portions of *stūpa* umbrellas at Sāñchī and Sārnāth; and three statues in the round, two in the Indian Museum at Calcutta, the third at Mathurā. Of these monuments, twelve bear records of Açoka himself, and three of his successor, Daçaratha; the age of the others is determined by their style, by the inscriptions carved upon them, or by their peculiar technique, every member but one in the group being identical in two distinct features, namely, in the exceeding care with which they are chiselled and in the brilliant polish afterwards imparted to their surface. Moreover, with the exception of the caves cut out of the natural gneiss rock in the Barābar hills, they are one and all of sandstone from a quarry near Chunār.