Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c12.s14.16

c12.s14.16

A few characteristics are common to all these sculptural and architectural remains. They are all monumental in conception and design, and inordinately fine, orderly, thorough and precise in execution. Moreover, with the exception of the remains of the royal palace and city-buildings of Pāṭaliputra, all of them were executed in hard grey sandstone of more or less big dimensions, always very finely chiselled and very highly polished to a glossiness that has hardly any parallel in India of later ages and in the world except in ancient Iran. And thirdly, all of them were reared up directly under the shadow of the royal throne of the Mauryas, Aśoka and his grandson fixing their stamp on the majority of them. We are thus confronted with an historical phenomenon that calls for an explanation. Here we are face to face with a period in ancient Indian history when a royal dynasty with imperial ambition and outlook suddenly discards wood and bamboo, perhaps also brick and clay, and takes to the employment of stone as the material *par excellence* for monumental sculpture and architecture, and this new material is handled with such perfect ease and mastery as to suggest that the art of hard and large size stone-cutting was as it were already long in practice. Except those carved out of live rock, all removable pieces were worked out of grey sandstone quarried at Chunar; the Mauryan columns are all carved out of this material, and it should be remembered that these huge columns are distributed over a very wide area, between Delhi in the west, Basarh in the east and Sāñchī in the south. Most certainly the huge resources of the state made available to the artists rendered possible the conception, planning and execution in such large and gigantic proportions. But royal will and state resources alone cannot explain the sudden transformation from wood, sun-dried brick, clay, ivory and metal to stone or from the fine workmanship and exquisite finish of ivory and metal work to bold and rounded work in stone of huge dimensions. It is possible to postulate that similar bold and large scale work was long in practice in wood in pre-Maurya days,