Page:History of Indian and Eastern Architecture Vol 1.djvu/85

 CHAP. I. INTRODUCTION. 53 This being the case, it would be in vain to look for any earlier architecture of any importance in India before A^oka's time : such could be expected only in countries where stone had been in use from the very earliest times. The Aryans, who were dominant before the rise of Buddhism, wrote books and expressed their ideas in words, like their congeners all the world over, but they do not seem successfully to have cultivated the aesthetic arts, or to have sought for immortality through the splendour or durability of their buildings. That was the aspira- tion of the Turanian and other races, and we owe it to this circumstance that we are enabled to write with any certainty the history of their rise and fall as evidenced in their archi- tectural productions. There is no d priori improbability that the Dravidian races of the south of India, or the indigenous races of the north, may not have erected temples or other buildings at a very early date, but if so, all that can be said is that all trace of them is lost. When we first meet the Buddhist style it is in its infancy a wooden style painfully struggling into lithic forms and we have no reason to suppose that other styles were then more advanced. When, however, we first meet them, some six or seven centuries afterwards, they are so complete in all their details, and so truly lithic in their forms, that they have hitherto baffled all attempts to trace them back to their original types, either in the wood or brick work, from which they may have been derived. So completely, indeed, have all the earlier examples been obliterated, that it is now doubtful whether the missing links can ever be replaced. Still, as one single example of a Hindu temple dating before the Christian Era might solve the difficulty, we ought not to despair of such being found, while the central provinces of India remain so unexplored as they are. Where, under ordinary circumstances, we ought to look for them, would be among the ruins of the ancient cities which once crowded the valley of the Ganges ; but there the ruthless Moslim or the careless Hindu have thoroughly obliterated all traces of any that may ever have existed. In the remote valleys of the Himalaya, or of Central India, there may, however, exist remains which will render the origin and progress of Hindu architecture as clear and as certain as that of the Buddhist ; but till these are discovered, it is with the architecture of the Buddhist that our history naturally begins. Besides this, however, from the happy accident of the Buddhists very early adopting the mode of excavating their temples in the living rock, their remains are imperishably preserved to us, while it is only too probable that those of the Hindu, being in less durable forms, have disappeared. The former, therefore,