Page:Rude Stone Monuments.djvu/516

490 called a Tee, and both are surrounded by three rows of tall stone pillars, as shown in the accompanying woodcut.

223. Lanka Ramayanu Dagoba, A.D. 231. From a photograph.

That the domical part of the dagoba is the lineal and direct descendant of the sepulchral tumuli or cairns, which are found everywhere in Northern Asia and probably existed in India in primæval times, is hardly open to doubt. This the Buddhists early refined into a relic shrine, probably immediately after the death of the founder of the religion, B.C. 543; and we know from numerous excavations that the relic was placed in a cist in the centre of the mound, nearly on the level of the soil, exactly where, and in the same manner as, the body-containing kistvaens of our sepulchral tumuli. To this, however, the Buddhists added a square box on the top, which either was invented by them or copied from some earlier form; but no dagoba was complete without it, and all the rock-cut examples and sculptured representations of topes, with many structural ones, still possess it. That it represented a wooden relic-casket may be assumed as certain, but whether it was ever used as such is not quite clear. The