3W ON ORISSA PROPER 



form, but smaller dimensions, which is called the Bhag Mandap, or apart* 

 ment in which the idol's food is served up, and afterwards distributed 

 amongst the officiating priests, &c. The Court of the Ling Raj contains 

 many other towers and temples apart from those already enumerated, in 

 which a variety of the inferior deities, or less esteemed forms of the greater 

 ones, are worshipped, and which add, by their style and number, to the ge- 

 neral grandeur of its appearance, but do not need a separate description. 

 The whole are adorned with a profusion of sculptured work, consisting of 

 elaborately wrought cornices, headings, arabesque and reticulated orna- 

 ments, and clusters of pilasters, with figures of men, animals, serpents and 

 flowers intervening, arranged in such an infinite variety of devices, that the 

 eye is absolutely bewildered in endeavouring to trace out any particular 

 pattern or design. Amongst the ornaments on the great flat central ribs 



of the Bara Dewal, there is one peculiarly remarkable from its resemblance 

 to some armorial, bearing or heraldic device. Mr. Erskine, 1 observe, has 

 given the figure of a strikingly similar ornament in his account of the cave 

 temples of Elephanta, vide Bombay Transactions, vol. i. page 217, and 

 plate vi. The brahmins explain it to be a compound of the Gada, Padma, 

 Sankh, and Chakra, or Mace, lotus, conch-shell and discus of Vishnu, 

 and it would seem therefore rather out of place, in the conspicuous posi- 

 tion which it occupies on the walls of the Ling Raj ; but, it may be observed 

 generally, of these edifices, that the sculptors have by no means confined 

 themselves, in their choice of ornaments, to emblems peculiar to the deity 

 of the place. 



The temple of the Ling Raj at Bhobaneser is both the finest monument 

 of antiquity which the province contains, and likewise indisputably the 

 most ancient. It took forty-three years to build, and local tradition as 

 well as the histories of the country, concur in fixing the date of its comple- 

 tion, as A. D. 657, 



\Te have no particular accounts, of the period and causes of the decline 



