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

63
In addition to a ground plan of the palace area
[16], a single illustration of the ruins of
Pataliputra is reproduced [17] to show the
extraordinary craftsmanship and permanence
of the city's girdle of fortifications. We see here
a portion of what, according to the excavators,
was an almost indefinitely extended construction,
consisting of upright timbers fifteen feet
high and fourteen and a half feet apart, with a
wooden floor and, originally, a wooden roof.
is
uncertain whether this tunnel was a passage
within the ramparts, or whether it was intended
to be filled with earth for added strength. It is as
though a small section of the London tube, or
the Holland tunnel beneath the Hudson, came
to the attention of future excavators to give a
slight clue to the complication and magnificence
of vanished cities. Although it is difficult
to clothe this fragment of Pataliputra with
towers and gateways rivalling the ancient
capitals of Iran, it does give us some slight
suggestion, by its vast extent and the enormous
It
strength of construction, of the great city of the
Maurya Empire.
Even more interesting were the remains
uncovered in the actual palace area: a great
audience hall was preceded by a number of
huge platforms built of solid wood in log-cabin
fashion [16]. They formed a kind of artificial
eminence or acropolis, like the palace platforms
ofancient Mesopotamia and Iran; undoubtedly,
these wooden structures were intended as
foundations or rafts for the support of some
kind of pavilions or stairways in front of the
palace itself. The remains of this building - an
audience hall or, to give it its Iranian name,
apadana - consisted of row upon row of colossal
sandstone columns, eighty in number, that once
supported a timber roof. Although most of the
ponderous monolithic shafts had sunk deep
into the earth in the course of centuries of
floods, enough fragments remained to show
that the plan of this hall corresponded very
closely to the arrangement of the great pillared