Page:History of Indian and Eastern Architecture Vol 2.djvu/122

 94 NORTHERN OR INDO-ARYAN STYLE. BOOK VI. matters, and how little we can understand the causes of such contrasts, unless we take affinities or differences of race into consideration. HISTORY. About eighty years ago Mr. Andrew Stirling published an 4 Account of Orissa proper or Cuttack,' giving a dynastic list of the rulers from B.C. 3101 to the beginning of last century, with dates and notable events of their reigns. 1 This was drawn up from native records belonging to the temple of Jagannath at Pun ; and, dismissing the early portions as manifestly fabulous, the record, from the accession of Yayati Ke^ari towards the end of the 5th century, was accepted as tolerably trustworthy, and was revised and published with a fuller list of the names by Sir W. W. Hunter in his ' Orissa.' 2 But, like other native histories, it cannot stand examination, and must be discarded as worthless previous to the 1 2th century, and very inaccurate even for the last four or five centuries. Here, as elsewhere, we can hope for trustworthy historical information only from the steady pursuit of epigraphical research, which as yet has yielded but four or five names of a Somavam^i or Lunar dynasty that ruled before the 1 2th century ; and their inscriptions are unfortunately dated only in regnal years, and must be relegated, on epigraphical grounds, to about the nth century. 3 We have thus, as yet, but little help from historical sources. It is true that the dates of two of its temples have been approximately ascertained. The great one at Bhuvane^war is said to have been erected about A.D. 640 but possibly later and that at Puri between A.D. 1080 and 1 140, nearly the first and the last of the series. My impression is that in the later direction it can hardly be extended beyond the year 1260, but within these limits it seems possible to arrange the sequence of all the temples in the province without much difficulty, and to ascertain their dates with some degree of approximate certainty. With the exception of the great temple of Jagannath at Puri, the buildings described in this chapter were mostly erected 1 'Asiatic Researches,' vol. xv. (1825), pp. 163!?. ; also 'History of the Rajas of Orissa, from the reign of Raja Yudhistira. Translated from the Varmavali,' in 'Jour. Asiat. Soc. Bengal,' vol. vi. (1837), pp. 756-766. 2 'Orissa' (ed. 1872) vol. i. pp. igSf. and vol. ii. pp. 183-191 ; also in SewelFs ' Lists of Inscriptions and Dynasties of Southern India,' pp. 204-209. An out- line of the history of Orissa is given in the new ' Gazetteer of Puri, ' chap. ii. 3 Among four successive rulers, of which we have inscriptions, tentatively placed in the nth century, the third, Yayati Maha-5ivagupta, may possibly be the Yayati Ke^ari, which the Varmavali makes the founder of the dynasty in 474- 526, or five centuries before his probable date. Dr J. F. Fleet in 'Epigraphia Indica,' vol. iii. pp. 323-359.