Page:The Buddhist Antiquities Of Nagarjunakonda MASI 54 Longhurst A. H..djvu/21

8 to the site by means of the river and landed at a stone-built wharf the ruins of which still exist. This wharf is about 250 feet in length, 50 feet in width and about 6 feet high along the water front. Three rows of broken -stone pillars extending from end to end indicate that it was covered with a wooden roof probably thatched since no remains of tiles were found on the site. This long building no doubt served as a Goods Shed and Customs House as the river traffic must have been considerable as there were no roads for wheeled traffic. Porters carrying head-loads and also pack-bullocks probably entered the valley through the narrow gorge mentioned above but this route was impossible for carts, However, I did manage to get two carts over the hills and through the gorge into the valley, but they had to be taken to pieces and carried by porters and re-assembled on the other side of the gorge. The carts were absolutely necessary in the valley for the removal of the heavy sculptures recovered from the numerous sites to a special enclosure which I had constructed for their temporary protection, prior to the building of an open-air museum which I trust will soon be completed on the spot. The collection of sculptures and statues is the largest and finest ever made in Southern India and the illustrations given in this volume represent only a few typical examples selected from over four hundred museum specimens: The extraordinary thing about many of them is their good state of preservation.

With the exception of a few little image houses found in some of the monastic establishments which are square on plan, all the Buddhist temples discovered at Nagarjunakonda are apsidal buildings oblong on plan. They are long brick buildings with an apse at one end and a doorway at the other, the thick walls were high and the roof was built of brick in the form of a barrel-vault. There were no windows, other than perhaps a small opening above the doorway. so that when the door was closed the interior was in semi-darkness. The walls of the interior were plain and covered with plaster and whitewash. The floors and steps were of stone, the front step being cut in the form of a semi-circle and usually known as a moonstone. With one exception, all the moonstones discovered at Nagarjunakonda are plain. The one exception had an outer border decorated with a procession of lions, horses and bulls in bas-relief. There is nothing remarkable about the moonstones found in India, it*was only in Ceylon where the Buddhists developed this architectural member into a thing of surprising beauty. The exterior walls of the temples were ornamented with a few rows of simple mouldings along the base and cornice, while the summit of the waggon- headed roof was adorned with a row of tall pottery finials. The orientation of these temples seems to have been a matter of chance rather than of choice as they face in all directions without any distinction.

In Plate IV (6), we have a plan of Temple 1 built by the Princess Chamtisiri in the second century A.D., or thereabouts, as already mentioned, When first discovered, the temple was represented by a mound of decayed brick débris overgrown with rank vegetation with nothing to indicate what type of ruined