The art and architecture of India - Buddhist, Hindu, Jain (Art Ebook)

AFGHANISTAN 173
*$ w
116. Bamivan, lantern roof
from the square of the chamber to the circle of
the cupola [115]. This type has its true structural
prototype in the four-columned fire temples of
the Sasanian Period in Iran. These sanctuaries
are in a way the distant cousins of such European
churches as St Germain-des-Pres. Another
type of roof that is found in a number of caves at
Bamivan is the lantern roof, a very simple and
primitive type of dome that is perhaps the
ancestor of all more complicated domical constructions.
The lantern roof, which is known in
modern wooden constructions literally from
Armenia to Central Asia, was probably invented
somewhere on the Iranian plateau and introduced
to both western Asia and Turkestan. It is
a method of roofing whereby beams are laid
diagonally across the corners of a square and
the process is repeated in successive tiers, so
that finally only a small opening remains at the
summit of this arrangement in diminishing
squares.
A literal rock-cut copy of such a structure
may be seen in one of the caves to the west of the
larger Buddha at Bamivan [1 16]. The whole was
probably painted at one time with representations
of Buddhist deities. The triangles left over,
as each successive smaller square was inscribed
in the larger, provided room for sculptural
decoration, so that the whole arrangement was
not only a roof, but a kind of mandala or