The Army of the Indian Moghuls: Its Organization and Administration c26.27

c26.27

It was evidently a *sībā* that was built by Dārā Shukoh when besieging Qandahār in 1063 H. (1653). “He mounted a battery on a high and solid mound of earth” (Elphinstone, “History”, 513). We also find the word used in the *Mirāt-uṣ-ṣafā*, foll. 99*b*, when in 1169 H. (July 1756 ¹) the French under Bussy were invested in the Chahār Maḥal at Ḥaidarābād. The assailants erected *sībah*. Something of the same sort was had recourse to by the native besiegers of Arcot in 1751 (Orme “Mil. Trans.” i, 191). They filled up a house with earth, and on this as a base they raised a square mound, which commanded the gate and every part within the fort. The same kind of thing is referred to by Orme, “Hist. Frag.”, 153, on the authority of Manucci (Catrou, 4to edition of 1715, 3rd part, p. 177), as having been used at the siege of Gūlkhandah in 1687. A vast mound of earth was raised to a level with the wall and the artillery mounted on it. Wilks, ii, 360, was told by Sir Barry Close, one of the garrison, that when Tellicherry (Malabar District) was besieged in 1782, Sirdār Khān employed what was evidently a *sībā*, though the name is not used. “An immense extent of base served as the foundation for several successive stories, constructed of the trunks of trees in successive layers, crossing each other and compacted by earth rammed between the intervals; the contrivances in the rear for raising the guns were removed when the erection was complete; successive stories were raised as the besieged covered themselves from each in turn”. Lake, 221, calls these erections “cavaliers”, and compares them to the great mounds raised by the ancients in their sieges. (For “Cavalier”, see Voyle, 69).