Cremation, Caste, and Cosmogony in Karmic Traditions.

therefore concentrate on his documentation and
hypothesis although I will include other interpretations
which differ from Marshall’s.
The temple is located outside the city wall, and Jandial
may have been built for fire worship. The length of the
temple is 158 ft and the width is 85 ft and it has Ionic
columns (fig. 17.2). The plan of the temple is unlike any
of the Indian temples but its resemblance to the classical
temples of Greece is striking. In Greece a peristyle of
columns surrounds the ordinary peripheral temple, and it
contains a pronaos or front porch, a naos or sanctuary,
and an opisthodomos or back porch. An extra chamber
between the sanctuary and the back porch was common
in some large temples such as Parthenon in Athens and
the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, and the plan of the
temple of Jandial is structured almost identically. The
main difference, which is crucial in this case, is that
instead of an extra chamber between the sanctuary and
the back porch, at Jandial there was a solid mass of
masonry, the foundations of which were carried down
over 20 ft below the temple floor. Based on the depth of
these foundations it seems that the masonry was
intended to carry a heavy superstructure, which
apparently rose in the form of a tower considerably
higher than the rest of the building. Access to the tower
was probably from ascending steps from the
opisthodomos at the rear of the temple. Marshall
estimates the height of the tower to have been about 40
ft (Marshall 1951a:222-223), but he does not mention if
there has been found any human skeletal remains in the
temple or in the vicinity.
The strikingly Greek character of the plan and the design
of the Ionic pillars suggest that it was erected under the
rule of the Bactrian Greek kings who built and occupied
the Sirkap city during the second century BCE (Marshall
1951a:225, 229). The superstructure of the temple,
including the architrave, frieze and cornice, appears to
have been made of wood. Similarly, the roof of the
temple was most likely flat and made of wood, and not
of the usual ridge type in Greek temples. If the roof had
been made by sloping tiles or metal plates, then there
should have been remains of the tiles, but there were no
traces of such remains preserved. Therefore, based on
the finds Marshall concludes that the roof of the temple
was flat, like most of the buildings in the Orient, and
protected by half a foot of clay spread over the timbers
(ibid:224).
The religious character of the temple is a question that
cannot be answered with certainty. It was most likely not
Buddhist due to the total absence of any Buddhist
images or other characteristic relics and because of its
unusual plan. For similar reasons one must rule out that
this was a Brahmanical or a Jain temple. The solid tower
in the middle of the temple is significant and bears some
similarities to the ziggurats of Mesopotamia. Thus,
Marshall concludes “from its presence, as well as from
the entire absence of images, that the temple was
258
probably Zoroastrian. If this was so, the fire altar may
have stood on the summit of the tower” (Marshall
1951a:226). J. J. Modi doubted the hypothesis about the
location of the altar, and argued that the altar stood in the
inner sanctuary or naos and the tower was used for other
purposes (Modi 1915), but he agreed that it was a
Zoroastrian temple.
Nazimuddin Ahman has tried to show that the date of the
Jandial temple cannot be earlier than Azes I (ca. 57-35
BCE), and his main arguments are that (1) no Bactrian
Greek King is known to have professed Zoroastrian
religion, (2) no coins of Indo-Greek rulers were found
from the temple, (3) the covered passage around the
temple is un-Greek, (4) the temple is contemporary with
the nearby Mohra Maliaran Temple, and (5) the presence
of a stone slab with foot-prints of Buddha points towards
first century BCE and not earlier. These arguments are in
themselves, however, insufficient for deciding the date
of the temple as well as the religious character of the
temple (Dar 1984:51). As Marshall notes regarding the
coins, they were found in the deep accumulation of
debris covering the ruins, into which they must have
found their way at some time subsequent to the
destruction of the temple, but before the later medieval
temple was erected (Marshall 1951a:224). Nevertheless,
regarding the date of the temple, Marshall says, “I am
inclined to the view that both the Jandial temple and the
Mohra Maliaran shrine were erected under the Sakas in
the first century B.C. rather than under the Greeks in the
second century B.C., though…the point is still a
debatable one” (ibid:225). In a late postscript he argued
that the temple belongs to the Greek period (ibid:229).
It has also been argued that the Jandial temple has
nothing to do with Zoroastrianism and that “this temple
is a pure Greek monument of the second century BC. A
few unclassical features in this temple do not affect its
over-all-Greek character. Instead, these reflect the
Hellenistic spirit of experiment, accommodation and
adoption” (Dar 1984:33), and Dar continues, “thus it is
clearly established that Jandial Temple dates back to the
rule of the Bactrian Greeks, as originally planned, it had
nothing to do with Zoroastrianism. Having been built by
the Greeks and most probably for the Greeks
themselves, the temple was meant to display, in its naos,
some statues of the Hellenistic Parthenon” (ibid:53). The
combination of a Fire Sanctuary and a Fire Temple
never occurred until the last of the Parthian period, and
the Jandial Temple contains none of the peculiarities of a
Fire temple of the Achaemenian, Parthian, or Sassanian
periods (ibid:47). Dar uses the construction of the temple
itself as a weighty argument against the idea of a tower.
He argues that even if we “accept the sturdiest of all the
proportions known between the bottom and top of the
column of an Ionic order i.e. 1:8, the total height of the
façade of the Jandial Temple, including the height of the
columns…could not have been less than 12 to 13
metres” (ibid:52).