I Have Therefore Ventured To Call It The Arian
Order - A Name To Which It Has A Double Right; First, Because It
Was The Style Of The Aryas, Or Arians, Of Kashmir; And, Secondly,
Because Its Intercolumniations Are Always Of Four Diameters - An
Interval Which The Greeks Called Araiostyle.
Extract from Vigne's "Travels in Kashmir."
The Hindu temple of Marttand is commonly called the House of the
Pandus. Of the Pandus it is only necessary to say that they are the
Cyclopes of the East. Every old building, of whose origin the poorer
class of Hindus in general have no information, is believed to have
been the work of the Pandus. As an isolated ruin, this deserves, on
account of its solitary and massive grandeur, to be ranked not only
as the first ruin of the kind in Kashmir, but as one of the noblest
among the architectural relics of antiquity that are to be seen in
any country. Its noble and exposed situation at the foot of the hills
reminded me of that of the Escurial. It has no forest of cork-trees
and evergreen-oaks before it, nor is it to be compared, in point of
size, with that stupendous building; but it is visible from as great
a distance. And the Spanish sierra cannot for a moment be placed in
competition with the verdant magnificence of the mountain-scenery
of Kashmir.
Few of the Kashmirian temples, if any, I should say, were
Buddhist. Those in or upon the edge of the water were rather, I should
suppose, referable to the worship of the Nagas, or snake-gods. The
figures in all the temples are almost always in an erect position,
and I have never been able to discover any inscription in those
now remaining.
I had been struck with the great general resemblance which the temple
bore to the recorded disposition of the Ark and its surrounding
curtains, in imitation of which the Temple at Jerusalem was built;
and it became for a moment a question whether the Kashmirian temples
had not been built by Jewish architects, who had recommended them to
be constructed on the same plan for the sake of convenience merely. It
is, however, a curious fact, that in Abyssinia, the ancient Ethiopia,
which was also called "Kush," the ancient Christian churches are
not unlike those of Kashmir, and that they were originally built in
imitation of the temple, by the Israelites who followed the Queen
of Sheba, whose son took possession of the throne of Kush, where his
descendants are at this moment Kings of Abyssinia.
Without being able to boast, either in extent or magnificence,
of an approach to equality with the temple of the sun at Palmyra,
or the ruins of the palace at Persepolis, Marttand is not without
pretensions to a locality of scarcely inferior interest, and deserves
to be ranked with them as the leading specimen of a gigantic style
of architecture that has decayed with the religion it was intended
to cherish, and the prosperity of a country it could not but adorn.
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