248 
The Ruins at Kopari. 
[No. 3, 
having, however, the colour and general appearance of rusty iron 
boiler plates. This formation is not, of course, continuous ; there 
occur large spaces where the laterite is covered with more or less 
depth of earth, and on such spots are rice fields, tanks and. houses 
and large mango and pipal trees. The ruins stand on the north 
side of the village, the more important and better preserved por¬ 
tion is situated in the very middle of the flat laterite surface, but 
other parts are found in the softer soil among trees. The plan of 
them is given below. 
Before proceeding to describe the details, it will be as well to 
make some introductory remarks. These ruins exhibit the traces 
of an ancient Buddhist temple, and vihara or monastery, with a 
pleasure ground or grove intervening. The Buddhist temple ap¬ 
pears to have been destroyed and its materials used to erect a 
Brahmanieal temple dedicated to Shiva, whose emblems in a later 
style of art, some in fact comparatively modern, are found in 
abundance. Later than these supervened the present Vishnu 
worship, now the prevailing type of Hinduism in Orissa, so that a 
considerable amount of wilful, and some also accidental, displace¬ 
ment and destruction has taken place. 
The Shiva and Vishnu buildings are rude in the extreme, and are 
composed of stones evidently taken from some earlier fabric, as the 
architectural design and sculptures are entirely disconnected, a 
stone with a bold moulding being placed upon a perfectly plain one 
and vice versa , and one edifice in particular being crowned, in¬ 
stead of a pinnacle or spire, by a capital exactly agreeing with 
those of the pillars still remaining in situ on the earlier building. 
Of this earlier building I can give no plan. It stands about 
200 yards to the east of the building marked A, and consists of 
a confused mass of laterite hewn stones of very great size, but no 
outlines can be traced without digging, for which I had no time. 
I would hazard the conjecture, however, that it was a square of 
about 38 feet in length on each side. In what seems to have been 
the centre, is a huge square mass of laterite like an altar, about 
four feet high, and at each corner a small niche in one of which 
was the image of Mayadevi above mentioned. One of the other 
niches has been removed to a distance of about half a mile, and set 
