56 
W. Hoey —Set Mahet. 
[Extra No. 
eponymous patriarch, states that the shrine contained a statue of each 
patriarch when it was in its complete state. I have therefore opened 
the mound of Somnath with great care. I have been so fortunate as to 
recover on this occasion images of seven several patriarchs here. I had 
previously recovered some images in 1875-76, and had also pieced to¬ 
gether the image there lying in the shrine of Somnath. It was one of 
Sumati, the fifth patriarch. I brought them all into Gondah where I left 
them to be placed in the Anjuman ; but they are now lying in fragments 
among the rockeries of a chick house in the public garden. I propose to 
remove the pieces which make up the image of Sumati and send them 
to the Lucknow Museum. 
The plastered building, which now crowns the mound of Somnath, 
is Pathan in style : and I have a suspicion that it is a tomb of some 
Mussalman who fell here in some assault. I have not opened it. I have 
almost wholly cleared the mound round it, and but little more labour 
would have been needed to open it to its full depth, but this would have 
probably led to the fall of the domed structure on the top. The most 
remarkable point about Somnath is that there are traces of an ancient 
enclosing wall on the south which shows there was at one time a court¬ 
yard fronting a large building. When this building fell there was an¬ 
other built above it, and it was similarly succeeded by another, and so on, 
until we have traces of at least four buildings distinct in style and age, 
before the final Mussalman erection. A reference to the large plan of 
Somnath shows a bird’s eye view of the walls exposed, but I regret I 
had no means of procuring a drawing or photograph of the floral pilas¬ 
ter of the building of the second age on the south, or of the cornice of 
a somewhat later building in the middle. These were of exceptionally 
neat and elegant design. The floral bricks seem to have been chiselled 
to remove inequalities after they had been moulded and baked. I have 
in figures 11 to 31 on plate XXVI shown some of the floral bricks worked 
into this building. 
The images I have recovered at, or near, Somnath are shown in the 
accompanying plates. One of them bears a Sanscrit inscription recording 
that it was dedicated in Samvat 1133 by Sutan Pandit This is possibly 
the period of a revival of Jainism, and restoration of shrines, after the 
first wave of Muhummadan invasion had swept by. 
There were two other Jain temples near Somnath, the ruins of which 
I fully opened. They are marked J 1 and J 2. There were three small 
separate cells, or shrines, in J 2. The images were all found in the 
northern and middle shrines. The cell to the south was empty. One 
these images too, bore the Sanskrit inscription mentioned above, which I 
consider points to the restoration of these shrines at the same time. 
