26 
Ancient Javanese Iiemains. 
[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 Ganesha 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 Fahian 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. 
