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60 the religious attitude of the Aryans in Vedic times to that given by Fergusson when he writes of the sikhara that "no-one can accuse the pure Aryans of introducing this form into India, or of building temples at all, or of worshipping images of Siva and Vishnu with which these temples are filled."

Another more ancient Mesopotamian sculpture is the famous stele of Narām Sin, circ. 2750, in the Louvre (Pl. XX, ), commemorating his victory over Satuni, King of Lulaba. Whether the tall cone represents a king's fort, or is only an artistic convention for the summit of a lofty mountain, it certainly suggests a connection between the Indian sikhara and Mesopotamian art, for the shrine crowned by the sikhara and by Vishnu's lotus emblem was a symbol of the holy mountain Mandara, of the mystic Merū round which the sun and moon revolved.

To sum up the evidence, it seems that the sikhara, as well as the many Assyrian or Babylonian decorative motives occurring at Sānchī and Bharhut, are accounted for by six centuries of Aryan rule in Mesopotamia. Used as a temporary shrine or tabernacle in ancient Vedic ritual, and later on in the cult of Yoga, the sikhara was introduced into India by the Aryan conquerors; there, by the employment of bambu in its construction, it acquired its peculiar Indian curvilinear form. Buddhism deprived it of its raison d'être as the shrine of the Sun-god; therefore the form only survived in bambu or wooden materials until the development of the cult of bhakti in Mahāyāna Buddhism again made the king, as a Bodhīsattva, the symbol of divine majesty and the temporary ruler of the Sangha. In Gupta times the revival of Vedic traditions in the royal courts of India