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128 doubtless among the "famous buildings of the world" discussed by Shah Jahān and his master-builders when the design of the Tāj Mahall at Agra was under consideration. The Bijāpūr monument was built under similar circumstances a few years before Shah Jahān commenced the wonderful memorial to his beloved wife.

It may be convenient for historical purposes to classify all Muhammadan buildings erected by the Indian master-builders under the Mogul dynasty, from its foundation by Bābur in 1526 down to the eighteenth century, as "Mogul," though they are by no means Mogul, or Mongolian, in design and are very varied in character. In order to understand the history of the Mogul or of any Indo-Muhammadan school of building, one must first consider the effect of Islam's war-like propaganda upon the building traditions of India. Before the Muhammadan conquest the Indian hereditary builders, whose traditions of technique and design went back in an unbroken line to some of the most ancient cities of the world, had for many centuries borrowed no structural ideas from outside India, but kept strictly to the craft ritual laid down in their own sacred writings. Though it is written in the Silpa-Sāstrās that the master-builder should be "conversant with all the sciences," it is probable that, as in the present day, every branch of the Indian building craft had become highly specialised, common traditions co-ordinating the different branches and preserving unity of structure and design.

Many centuries of practice within these lines had developed extraordinary technical skill without exhausting the immense fertility of invention possessed by the