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🔆Pillar Architecture: Mauryan’s Pillars
✅Mauryan Pillars (4th and 2nd Century BC) are one of the crucial architectural belongings of Ancient India. These pillars give details about the major incidents of those times, rulers, wars, etc. Thus, they are major sources of information for Historians.
✅Three types of pillars were made during the Mauryan period. The 1st variety was that of a wooden pillar. These pillars were used in the palace build by Chandra Gupta Maurya. These pillars are known only from literacy reference.
✅The other 2 varieties of pillars were made up of stone. Out of these 1st variety was used in the stone palace build by Ashoka to support the roof & 2nd variety represented Independent work.
✅Despite the fact that creating pillars is an ancient practice, Mauryan pillars vary from pillars in other regions of the globe (such as Achaemenian pillars) in that they are rock-cut pillars, demonstrating the carver’s talent.
✅Two kinds of stone were used to chisel these pillars. Some are made of white sandstone from the Mathura region, while others are made of buff-colored fine-grained hard sandstone mined in Chunar near Varanasi.
✅Capital is the topmost element of a pillar or column. Figures such as a bull, lion, elephant, and others were carved onto the upper half of the pillar. The capital figures (typically animals) are all carved standing on a square or circular abacus and are all forceful.
✅Abacuses have stylized lotuses on them.
✅The Lion Capital, a Mauryan pillar capital unearthed at Sarnath, is the best specimen of Mauryan sculpting tradition.
✅King Ashoka erected many pillars across his territory.
✅The pillars of Ashoka are a series of monolithic columns dispersed throughout the Indian subcontinent, erected or at least inscribed with edicts by the Mauryan Emperor Ashoka during his reign from c. 268 to 232 BCE.
✅Ashoka used the expression Dhaṃma thaṃbhā (Dharma stambha), i.e. “pillars of the Dharma” to describe his own pillars. These pillars constitute important monuments of the architecture of India, most of them exhibiting the characteristic Mauryan polish.
✅Of the pillars erected by Ashoka, twenty still survive including those with inscriptions of his edicts.
✅Only a few with animal capitals survive of which seven complete specimens are known. Two pillars were relocated by Firuz Shah Tughlaq to Delhi. Several pillars were relocated later by Mughal Empire rulers, the animal capitals being removed.
✅Averaging between 12 and 15 m (40 and 50 ft) in height, and weighing up to 50 tons each, the pillars were dragged, sometimes hundreds of miles, to where they were erected.
✅All the pillars of Ashoka were built at Buddhist monasteries, many important sites from the life of the Buddha and places of pilgrimage. Some of the columns carry inscriptions addressed to the monks and nuns. Some were erected to commemorate visits by Ashoka.
✅Major pillars are present in the Indian States of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and some parts of Haryana.
✅The capital without the crowning wheel and the lotus base has been adopted as the National Emblem of Independent India.
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