1855.] Notes on Assam Temple Ruins. 13 



greater number, of the stones, there are, in the rusty rivets and 

 clamps, and other appearances, evidences of their having been put 

 together ; in others, the absence of these indications, and the un- 

 finished state of the chiselling, denote they were still in the hands 

 of the stone-cutter, when the works were interrupted. 



The contemplated number of temples had not then been com- 

 pleted when the work of destruction commenced. The blocks are 

 all of the hardest granite, quarried from the neighbouring hills, and 

 no little skill and taste were required to produce, out of such mate- 

 rial, designs so graceful and so deeply and delicately carved, as we 

 find them. 



In the production of these works the art had reached its culmi- 

 nating point ; it set in a blaze, like a meteor, never to appear again. 



In the Journal of the Asiatic Seciety No. 40, for April, 1835, 

 there is a paper, on these ruins, by Capt. Gr. E. Westmacott ; it 

 gives a fair idea of their vast extent and spirited execution, but the 

 writer has so entirely mistaken the nature of some of the fragments, 

 as to give very erroneous ideas of the style of architecture intended. 



In his description of the columns, page 186, he uses as bases the 

 cross-shaped blocks, which by reference to other temples, we find 

 to be capitals. The large square slabs, referred to in page 192 as 

 altars, measuring 46 feet all round, were each intended to form the 

 entire flooring of a shrine. The raised position of one, alluded to 

 by Captain W., with steps, is a fanciful arrangement of the loose 

 stones by some modern devotee. The stones supposed by Captain 

 W. to be voussoirs of arches, are the segments of the circles 

 used in the formation of the pyramidal or conical roofs ; those 

 from the centre ornaments, mistaken for the key-stones, being the 

 corner stones of the first course of the cone ; the ornament filling 

 up the angle exposed, where the cone rested on the square of the 

 four architraves. 



The square blocks referred to in the same page, as " measuring 

 from 20 to 30 feet, concave in the centre, and sculptured in imita- 

 tion of chaplets of flowers," supposed by Captain Westmacott to 

 have been " beds, or altar places of Siva," were intended for the 

 crowning slabs of the pyramidal roofs of the temples. 



The carving represents the expanded petals of the lotus ; and the 



