26 Ancient Javanese Remains. [No. 1, 



The principal group of temples at Brambanan is or has been that 

 of Loro Jongran. They are so utterly ruined that, even when very 

 near them, you scarcely make out anything but great cairns of stones 

 heaped together. It must have been a tremendous earthquake that 

 produced such ruin. Closer examination shows among the chaos 

 many fragments of rich mouldings and sculpture, and some of the 

 basements, highly adorned with vases and festoons, are tolerably per- 

 fect. The largest pyramid of ruin you ascend to a height of some 

 five and thirty feet, and find entrances to cells opening to the four 

 cardinal points. The most remarkable circumstance about this ruin 

 is that three of those cells contain very fine and purely Hindu figures. 

 That to the north is an eight-armed goddess standing triumphantly 

 on a dead buffalo and grasping in one of her four left arms the curly 

 wig of a little monster. It is evidently the same subject that is 

 represented in Moor's Hindu Pantheon, plate 35, and therein entitled 

 " Durga or active Virtue slaying Maheshasura or Vice personified." 

 This is the figure called by the Javanese Loro Jongran, and giving 

 its name to the temple. It appears to be common among Javan re- 

 mains, as you will find half a dozen in the plates to Raffles. To the 

 west is G-anesha with his elephant head ; and to the south a fine 

 Jupiter-like bearded Siva with the trident.* The fourth entrance 

 was obstructed by fallen stone, and I was too tired to attempt to crawl 

 in. It is to the east, and probably was the entrance to a central 

 chamber. From the height at which these cells stand they must 

 evidently have formed an upper story of the temple. They are 

 carved on great slabs standing against the wall without being at- 

 tached to it, and I have some doubts if they are the original 

 occupants. The cells otherwise seem exactly parallel to those of the 

 cruciform Buddhist temples already described, and to which class 

 nearly all the other* Brambanan temples appear to belong. These 

 are, however, the most ancient, as we may guess from their utter ruin. 

 The other and more perfect temples cannot have been standing when 

 the tremendous earthquake occurred which rattled these down into such 

 a chaos. They may therefore have been the remains of a more ancient 

 Brahminical sanctuary, as we know from the travels of Fabian that 

 in his time (the beginning of the 5th century) Brahmins existed in 



* There is an engraving of this in Crawfurd. Indian Arch. II. pi. 27. 



