Zoomed Vinay Special · First-person editorial
Raja Raja Chola Had 400 Women's Names Carved on His Temple Wall, House by House. The Famous "No Shadow" Story Isn't There
The great temple at Thanjavur is covered in writing, and almost nobody reads it. I opened Eugen Hultzsch's 1891–1895 translations of those walls and read the king's own ledger: gold weighed against a named stone, bronzes measured in finger-breadths and rice grains, four hundred women listed by name, street and house number, and the pay of everyone from the accountant to the barber. Then I tested the stories every guide tells, the shadow, the 80-ton capstone and the four-mile ramp, against the oldest documents that tell them.
The point of view
Let me take you to Thanjavur, a little over a thousand years ago. A copper pot weighing 3,083 pala, plated with gold, is about to go onto the top of the king's new temple tower. A few months later the king gives an order: write everything down, in stone. So they did. Four hundred women, with their house numbers. Drummers, accountants, washermen, a goldsmith, and what each one was paid. The walls are a ledger. So here's my question. If the stone records all that, what does it say about the shadow that "never falls", and the 80-ton stone on top?
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E. Hultzsch (ed. and trans.), South-Indian Inscriptions, vol. II, Part I: Inscriptions on the Walls of the Central Shrine (Madras: Government Press, 1891), pp. 1–2, 8–10…
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E. Hultzsch (ed. and trans.), South-Indian Inscriptions, vol. II, Part II: Inscriptions on the Walls of the Enclosure (Madras, 1892), Nos. 29–30, pp. 134–138
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E. Hultzsch (ed. and trans.), South-Indian Inscriptions, vol. II, Part III: Supplement to the First and Second Volumes (Madras, 1895), Nos. 65–66, pp. 256, 259–261, 278–303
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H. Krishna Sastri, Introduction to South-Indian Inscriptions, vol. II (Madras, 1916), pp. 2, 10–14
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F. R. Hemingway, Madras District Gazetteers: Tanjore, vol. I (Madras: Government Press, 1906), pp. 1, 270–271
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"The central tower of the Great Pagoda" (album Photographic Views in Tanjore and Trivady, attributed to Linnaeus Tripe), University of Edinburgh collection, dated 1860, with…
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ICOMOS, Advisory Body Evaluation, World Heritage List No. 250, Brihadisvara Temple, Thanjavur (May and October 1987)
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ICOMOS, Advisory Body Evaluation No. 250 bis, The Great Living Chola Temples (2004)
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NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Earth Fact Sheet
nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov
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The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Shiva as Vanquisher of the Three Cities (Shiva Tripuravijaya), Chola period, ca
metmuseum.org
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