Manchester\Memoirs, Vol. lix. (191 5), No. 10. 79 



19-'.HT" 



I have already] referred to the former. Many of the 

 Dravidian temples are so precisely modelled on the plan 

 of the Theban temples of the New Empire that to question 

 the source of the inspiration of the former is impossible. 



" Fergusson first called attention to the striking 

 similarity in general arrangement and conception between 

 the great South Indian temples and those of ancient 

 Egypt. . . . The gopurams or gate-towers, which in 

 the later more ornate examples are decorated from the 

 base to the summit with sculptures of the Hindu 

 Pantheon, increase in size with the size of the walled 

 quadrangles, the outer ones becoming imposing land- 

 marks, which are visible for miles around, and are 

 strikingly similar to the pylons of Egyptian temples " 

 (Thurston, 101, pp. 158 and 161). Thus in the matter of 

 its early buildings India has* clearly been influenced by 

 Egypt, Phoenicia and Chaldea ; and this great cultural 

 wave impinged upon the Indian peninsula not before 

 the close of the eighth century B.C. 



It is important - also to remember that it reached 

 India just (perhaps not more than a century) before 

 another wave of a very different culture poured down 

 from the north, and introduced, among other things, the 

 practice of cremation. 



For our immediate purpose this is unfortunate, because 

 that practice is inspired by ideas utterly opposed to those 

 underlying the custom of embalming, and naturally 

 destroyed most, though by no means all, traces of the 

 latter. That the practice of embalming did actually 

 reach India from the west is known not merely because 

 evidence of unmistakably Egyptian technique is found 

 further east, but also because in India and Ceylon there 

 are definite traces of the custom, to which reference 

 has already been made in the foregoing pages. Cases 



