occasion of a great procession in honour of the Tooth relic which was there exposed to public view.[1]
Be all this as it may, the question which this comparison raises is simply this: If we admit the similarity between the Pullicondah cairn and the Lanka Ramayana Tope, and that the one grew out of the other, it seems to me perfectly evident that the adjunct of the Tope grew out of a wooden and not out of a rude-stone original. If this is so, and if the Tope did not grow out of the cairn, the conclusion seems to me inevitable that the cairn is only a rude copy of a polished original.
The same conclusion hinted at above was forced on me by the examination of the rude-stone circles which crowd round the elaborate tope at Amravati. Generally, I know of no hypothesis by which the phenomenon of polished-stone buildings, with known dates, existing in India for the last 2000 years side by side with rude-stone monuments which are being erected at this day, can be accounted for, unless we give up our favourite system of sequence and are content to take facts as we find them.
It is quite certain there were no hewn-stone buildings in India before the year 250 B.C., and my impression is that none of the rude-stone monuments now existing there were erected till five, it may be ten centuries from that time, and when they once began that there is no break in the sequence to the present day.
I know nothing that can be fairly urged against this reasoning, except our own ignorance, and that of the natives themselves, with regard to the origin and date of these monuments. Neither is much to be wondered at, as it is only so lately that Europeans have turned their attention to the subject, and the natives know so little about their own monuments that it would be strange indeed if they knew anything at all about those of the hated and despised Dasyus. Any one who has travelled in India knows what sort of information he gets even from the best and most intelligent Brahmins with regard to the dates of the temples they and their forefathers have administered in ever since their erection. One thousand or two or three thousand years is a
- ↑ 'Foe Koue Ki,' p. 335.
