Page:History of Indian and Eastern Architecture Vol 1.djvu/373

 CHAP. II. SIKHARAS. 325 both in plan and elevation. The 5ikharas are straight-lined in plan, and their section is never a segment of a circle ; it is not derived from any many-storeyed buildings, as the .rikharas or vimanas of the Dravidian architecture of the south of India, which seem certainly to have been copied from the many storeyed viharas of the Buddhists, and we cannot fancy any class of domestic building which could have formed a model out of which they could have been elaborated. One curious thing we do know, which is that all the ancient roofs in India, whether represented in the bas-reliefs or copied in the caves, were invariably curvilinear generally circular or rather ogee having a ridge added externally to throw off the rain from that weakest part ; but nothing on any bas-relief or painting gives us a hint of any building like these .rikharas. Another curious and perplexing circumstance regarding the .rikharas is that when we first meet them, at Bhuvane^war, for instance, on the Bay of Bengal, or at Pattadakal in the 7th century, near the west coast of India, the style is complete and settled in all its parts. There was no hesitation then, nor has there been any since. During the twelve or thirteen centuries that have elapsed since the erection of these earliest known examples, they have gone on becoming more and more attenuated, till they are almost as pointed as Gothic spires, and their degree of attenuation is no bad test of their age ; but they never changed in any essential feature of the design. All the parts found in the oldest examples are retained in the most recent, and are easily recognisable in the buildings of the present time. The one hypothesis that occurs to me as sufficient to account for this peculiarity is to assume that it was a con- structive necessity. If we take for instance an assumed section of the diagram (Woodcut No. 184, p. 324), it will be seen how easily a very tall pointed horizontal arch, like that of the Treasury at Mycenae referred to above, p. 312, would fit its external form. In that case we might assume that the tower at Bodh-Gaya took a straight-lined form like the doorway at Missolonghi and the ' Gate of Lions ' at Mycenae, while the Hindus took the more graceful curvilinear shape, which certainly was more common in remote classical antiquity, 1 and as it is found in Persia may have reached India at a remote period. This hypothesis does not account for the change from 1 See Woodcuts Nos. 102, 114, 124, 126, 129, 172, 177 and 178 of vol. i. of the author's ' History of Ancient and Mediaeval Architecture,' 3rd edn. ; and for the Missolonghi doorway and Mycenae Gate of Lyons, Ibid., Nos. 130 and 131 on p. 247.