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Sanskrit literature gives a vista of a great Aryan civilisation planted in Indian soil perhaps several millennia before the Christian Era, the evidence of its artistic evolution during this long period, which may lie buried on the sites of ancient Indian cities, such as Ajodhya, Mathurā, Kanauj, and Rājagriha, has not yet been unearthed. Indian archæological research, as yet, hardly goes farther back than the third century, when the Buddhist Emperor-Saint, Asoka, built splendid stūpas to enshrine the relics of the Blessed One, and marked the holy sites of Buddhism with colossal pillars carved in stone and inscribed with his edicts. These stūpas and pillars, together with the remains of chapels, monasteries, and hermitages, some structural and some carved in the living rock, provide the earliest visible evidence of the origins of Indian art.

It happens that the monuments of Asoka's time were almost exclusively dedicated to Buddhist worship; and as Buddhist doctrine was a revolt against the teaching of Brahmanism, it might be assumed that Asoka's propaganda brought about an entirely new departure in Indian building traditions—that early Buddhist art is to be entirely explained by the teaching of Buddhism. This would limit the field of investigation to the three centuries which preceded Asoka's