The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest, including the Invasion of Alexander the Great c29.117

c29.117

We have seen how Samudragupta practised and encouraged music. The other arts, too, shared the favour of the Gupta kings and prospered under their intelligent patronage. The accident that nearly the whole of the Gupta empire was repeatedly overrun and permanently occupied by Muslim armies, which rarely spared a Hindu building, accounts for the destruction of almost all large edifices of the Gupta age. But the researches of recent years have disclosed abundant evidence of the former existence of numerous magnificent buildings, both Buddhist and Brahmanical, which had been erected in the fifth and sixth centuries. A few specimens of architectural compositions on a considerable scale may still be seen in out-of-the-way places, which lay apart from the track of the hosts of Islam, and the surviving miniature shrines of the period are fairly numerous. Enough is known to justify the assertion that the art of architecture was practised on a large scale with eminent success.