The Colas c30.4

c30.4

The variety of jewels and ornaments of gold and precious stones, and the careful record of the numbers and classes of the stones and pearls mounted on each of these would be enough to enable a modern jeweller to reproduce most of them if only he knew their general formation; many of the ornaments mentioned have long since gone out of use, and no really old ornament has survived the ravages of invasion and war; the Tanjore inscriptions however enable one to see that the jeweller's art reached its high-water mark under the Cōḷas, and that the Tanjore jewellers produced the most pleasing results by studying the dispositions of precious stones and pearls with a view to their colour effects. If it is remembered that temples were only glorified palaces, that gods received all the honours due to kings (*rājōpacāra*), that kings were the models for their subjects to follow, and if, further, it is realised that the Tanjore temple differs from the hundreds of other temples only in its greater size and in the accuracy and completeness of its surviving inscriptions, it will be seen that it is not easy to exaggerate the importance of the amount of wealth held in the form of jewels or of the flourishing state of the goldsmith's trade. Neither the depredation of invading hosts nor the security of established government has succeeded in weaning the people from the hoarding habit. *Pax Britannica* was hardly more potent in this respect than Malik Kafur and Hyder Ali.