51-541: The Bhojeshwar Temple ( IAST : Bhojeśvara) is an incomplete Hindu temple in Bhojpur village of Madhya Pradesh , India. Dedicated to Shiva , it houses a 7.5-foot (2.3 m) high lingam in its sanctum. The temple's construction is believed to have started in the 11th century, during the reign of the Paramara king Bhoja . The construction was abandoned for unknown reasons, with the architectural plans engraved on
102-501: A Sanskrit word translating literally to "mountain peak", refers to the rising tower in the Hindu temple architecture of North India , and also often used in Jain temples . A shikhara over the garbhagriha chamber where the presiding deity is enshrined is the most prominent and visible part of a Hindu temple of North India. In South India , the equivalent term is vimana ; unlike
153-568: A macron ). Vocalic (syllabic) consonants, retroflexes and ṣ ( / ʂ ~ ɕ ~ʃ/ ) have an underdot . One letter has an overdot: ṅ ( /ŋ/ ). One has an acute accent : ś ( /ʃ/ ). One letter has a line below: ḻ ( / ɭ / ) (Vedic). Unlike ASCII -only romanisations such as ITRANS or Harvard-Kyoto , the diacritics used for IAST allow capitalisation of proper names. The capital variants of letters never occurring word-initially ( Ṇ Ṅ Ñ Ṝ Ḹ ) are useful only when writing in all-caps and in Pāṇini contexts for which
204-509: A century of scholarly usage in books and journals on classical Indian studies. By contrast, the ISO 15919 standard for transliterating Indic scripts emerged in 2001 from the standards and library worlds. For the most part, ISO 15919 follows the IAST scheme, departing from it only in minor ways (e.g., ṃ/ṁ and ṛ/r̥)—see comparison below. The Indian National Library at Kolkata romanization , intended for
255-433: A font, etc. It can be enabled in the input menu in the menu bar under System Preferences → International → Input Menu (or System Preferences → Language and Text → Input Sources) or can be viewed under Edit → Emoji & Symbols in many programs. Equivalent tools – such as gucharmap ( GNOME ) or kcharselect ( KDE ) – exist on most Linux desktop environments. Users of SCIM on Linux based platforms can also have
306-460: A platform 115 feet (35 m) long, 82 feet (25 m) wide and 13 feet (4.0 m) high. On the platform lies a sanctum containing a large lingam . The sanctum plan comprises a square; on the outside, each side measures 65 feet (20 m); on the inside, each measures 42.5 feet (13.0 m). The lingam is built using three superimposed limestone blocks. The lingam is 7.5 feet (2.3 m) high and 17.8 feet (5.4 m) in circumference. It
357-415: A style that matches the original. The monolith was procured from the area near Agra after a nationwide search for material matching the stone originally used in the temple. The team was unable to procure a crane with a sufficiently long boom. So, they lifted the monolith 30 feet up with the help of a system of pulleys and levers , which took 6 months to devise. KK Muhammed noted that two other pillars in
408-649: Is a transliteration scheme that allows the lossless romanisation of Indic scripts as employed by Sanskrit and related Indic languages. It is based on a scheme that emerged during the 19th century from suggestions by Charles Trevelyan , William Jones , Monier Monier-Williams and other scholars, and formalised by the Transliteration Committee of the Geneva Oriental Congress , in September 1894. IAST makes it possible for
459-583: Is argued that stylistic aspects seen on Buddhist architecture like the stupa may have been influenced by the shikhara , a stylistic element which in some regions evolved to the pagoda . Shikhara can be classified into three main forms: The early history of the Hindu shikhara is unclear, but the Buddhist Mahabodhi Temple at Bodh Gaya has a straight-sided shikhara tower over 55 metres (180 feet) high, with an amalaka near
510-782: Is by setting up an alternative keyboard layout . This allows one to hold a modifier key to type letters with diacritical marks. For example, alt + a = ā. How this is set up varies by operating system. Linux/Unix and BSD desktop environments allow one to set up custom keyboard layouts and switch them by clicking a flag icon in the menu bar. macOS One can use the pre-installed US International keyboard, or install Toshiya Unebe's Easy Unicode keyboard layout. Microsoft Windows Windows also allows one to change keyboard layouts and set up additional custom keyboard mappings for IAST. This Pali keyboard installer made by Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC) supports IAST (works on Microsoft Windows up to at least version 10, can use Alt button on
561-594: Is no entry fee in the museum and the museum is open for visitors from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM. The monument is now under the protection of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). Because of its proximity to the state capital Bhopal (28 km), it attracts a considerable number of tourists. In 2015, the site received the National Tourism Award (2013–14) for the "Best maintained and Disabled Friendly Monument". Despite being unfinished,
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#1732772141722612-678: Is set on a square platform, whose sides measure 21.5 feet (6.6 m). The total height of the lingam, including the platform is over 40 feet (12 m). The doorway to the sanctum is 33 feet (10 m) high. The wall at the entrance features sculptures of apsaras , ganas (attendants of Shiva) and river goddesses. The temple walls are window-less and are made of large sandstone blocks. The pre-restoration walls did not have any cementing material. The northern, southern and eastern walls feature three balconies , which rest on massive brackets . These are faux balconies that are purely ornamental. They are not approachable from either inside or outside of
663-517: The Deccan Plateau and West India, the Latina form of the shikhara is well-established, with an amalaka disk-stone at the top, and then a kalasha urn. There is often a sukanasa feature over the entrance door. The forms with smaller subsidiary spires begin in the 10th century, and from then on tend to predominate. The Khajuraho Group of Monuments has several early forms from early in
714-445: The cornerstones feature four different divine couples: Shiva - Parvati , Brahma - Shakti , Rama - Sita , and Vishnu - Lakshmi . A single couple appears on all the three faces of each bracket. While the superstructure remains incomplete, it is clear that the shikhara (dome tower) was not intended to be curvilinear. According to Kirit Mankodi, the shikhara was intended to be a low pyramid-shaped samvarana roof, usually featured in
765-424: The mandapas . According to Adam Hardy , the shikhara probably intended to be of phamsana (rectilinear in outline) style, although it is of bhumija ( Latina or curvilinear in outline) style in its detailing. The incomplete but richly carved dome is supported by four octagonal pillars, each 39.96 feet (12.18 m) high. Each pillar is aligned with 3 pilasters . These 4 pillars and 12 pilasters are similar to
816-443: The navaranga-mandapa s of some other medieval temples, in which 16 pillars were organized to make up 9 compartments. The remnants of a sloping ramp can be seen on the north-eastern corner of the building. The ramp is built of sandstone slabs, each measuring 39 x 20 x 16 inches. The slabs are covered with soil and sand . The ramp itself is 300 feet (91 m) long, and slopes upwards to a height of 40 feet (12 m). Originally,
867-450: The shikhara , this refers to the whole building, including the sanctum beneath. In the south, shikhara is a term for the top stage of the vimana only, which is usually a dome capped with a finial ; this article is concerned with the northern form. The southern vimana is not to be confused with the elaborate gateway-towers of south Indian temples, called gopuram , which are often taller and more prominent features in large temples. It
918-663: The 11th century with certainty. A Jain temple in Bhojpur, which shares the same sets of mason's marks with the Shiva temple, has an inscription explicitly dated to 1035 CE. Besides several literary works, historical evidence confirms that Bhoja's reign included the year 1035 CE: the Modasa copper plates (1010-11 CE) were issued by Bhoja; and the Chintamani-Sarnika (1055 CE) was composed by his court poet Dasabala. Moreover,
969-399: The 11th-century Paramara king Bhoja . Tradition also attributes to him the establishment of Bhojpur and the construction of now-breached dams in the area. Because the temple was never completed, it lacks a dedicatory inscription. However, the name of the area ("Bhojpur") corroborates its association with Bhoja. This belief is further supported by the site's sculptures, which can be dated to
1020-467: The 20th century. Detailed architectural plans for the finished temple are engraved on the rocks in the surrounding quarries. These architectural plans indicate that the original intention was to build a massive temple complex with many more temples. The successful execution of these plans would have made Bhojpur one of the largest temple complexes in India. The marks of over 1,300 masons are engraved on
1071-482: The Bhojpur temple is the only surviving shrine that can be attributed to Bhoja with some certainty. According to a legend in Merutunga's Prabandha-Chintamani , when Bhoja visited Srimala , he told the poet Magha about the "Bhojasvāmin" temple that he was about to build, and then left for Malwa (the region in which Bhojpur is located). However, Magha (c. 7th century) was not a contemporary of Bhoja, and therefore,
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#17327721417221122-453: The area around the temple once featured three dams and a reservoir . The construction of such a large Shiva temple, dams and reservoir could have only been undertaken by a powerful ruler. All this evidence appears to confirm the traditional belief that the temple was commissioned by Bhoja. Archaeology professor Kirit Mankodi dates the temple to the later part of Bhoja's reign, around mid-11th century. The Udaipur Prashasti inscription of
1173-562: The area of Sanskrit studies make use of free OpenType fonts such as FreeSerif or Gentium , both of which have complete support for the full repertoire of conjoined diacritics in the IAST character set. Released under the GNU FreeFont or SIL Open Font License , respectively, such fonts may be freely shared and do not require the person reading or editing a document to purchase proprietary software to make use of its associated fonts. Shikhara Shikhara ( IAST : Śikhara ),
1224-410: The building lacked a roof. Based on this, archaeologist KK Muhammed theorizes that the roof could have collapsed due to a mathematical error made while calculating the load; subsequently, circumstances might have prevented Bhoja from rebuilding it. The evidence from the abandoned site has helped the scholars understand the mechanics and organisation of 11th century temple construction. To the north and
1275-544: The century, though Latina ones reappear after about 1050, in examples like the Vamana Temple . The bhumija spire probably first appears around 1000-1025, with other temples begun in the 1050s, such as the Shiv Mandir, Ambarnath . Shikharas form an element in the many styles of Hindu temple architecture , of which the three most common are Nagara , Vesara , and Dravidian : In every style of shikhara/vimana,
1326-415: The construction of this shrine for the peace of soul of his father Sindhuraja or of his uncle Munja , who suffered a humiliating death in enemy territory. It appears that the construction work stopped abruptly. The reasons are not known, but historians speculate that the abandonment may have been triggered by a sudden natural disaster , a lack of resources, or a war. Before its restoration during 2006–07,
1377-512: The construction. The marks would have been erased while giving the finishing touches, had the temple been completed. By 1950, the building had become structurally weak because of the regular rainwater percolation and removal of the stone veneers . In 1951, the site was handed over to the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) for conservation, in accordance with the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act 1904 . During
1428-536: The consumer edition since XP. This is limited to characters in the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP). Characters are searchable by Unicode character name, and the table can be limited to a particular code block. More advanced third-party tools of the same type are also available (a notable freeware example is BabelMap ). macOS provides a "character palette" with much the same functionality, along with searching by related characters, glyph tables in
1479-631: The convention is to typeset the IT sounds as capital letters. For the most part, IAST is a subset of ISO 15919 that merges the retroflex (underdotted) liquids with the vocalic ones ( ringed below ) and the short close-mid vowels with the long ones. The following seven exceptions are from the ISO standard accommodating an extended repertoire of symbols to allow transliteration of Devanāgarī and other Indic scripts , as used for languages other than Sanskrit. The most convenient method of inputting romanized Sanskrit
1530-456: The early 1990s, the ASI repaired the damaged steps of the platform and the sanctum, and also restored the missing ones. It also restored the facade on the north-west corner of the temple. During 2006–07, the ASI team supervised by KK Muhammed restored the monument. The team added a missing pillar to the structure. The 12-tonne pillar was carved out of a single stone by expert masons and sculptors in
1581-404: The east of the temple, there are several quarry sites, where unfinished architectural fragments in various stages of carving were found. Also present are the remains of a large sloping ramp erected for carrying the carved slabs from the quarries to the temple site. Several carvings brought to the temple site from the quarries had been left at the site. The ASI moved these carvings to a warehouse in
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1632-525: The entrance. It is thought that this shape of a truncated pyramid was derived from the design of the stepped stupas which had developed in Gandhara , as seen in the stupas of Jaulian , with an elongated structure formed of a succession of steps with niches containing Buddha images, alternating with Greco-Roman pillars, and topped by a stupa. By at least 600 CE in Odisha , and perhaps somewhat later in
1683-428: The later Paramara rulers states that Bhoja "covered the earth with temples" dedicated to the various aspects of Shiva, including Kedareshvara, Rameshwara, Somanatha, Kala , and Rudra. Tradition also attributes the construction of a Saraswati temple to him (see Bhoj Shala ). The Jain writer Merutunga, in his Prabandha-Chintamani , states that Bhoja constructed 104 temples in his capital city of Dhara alone. However,
1734-473: The legend is anachronistic . The temple originally stood on the banks of a reservoir 18.5 long and 7.5 miles wide. This reservoir was formed through construction of 3 earth-and-stone dams during Bhoja's reign. The first dam, built on Betwa River , trapped the river waters in a depression surrounded by hills. A second dam was constructed in a gap between the hills, near present-day Mendua village. A third dam, located in present-day Bhopal, diverted more water from
1785-700: The opportunity to install and use the sa-itrans-iast input handler which provides complete support for the ISO 15919 standard for the romanization of Indic languages as part of the m17n library. Or user can use some Unicode characters in Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A, Latin Extended Additional and Combining Diarcritical Marks block to write IAST. Only certain fonts support all the Latin Unicode characters essential for
1836-402: The ramp reached up to the temple wall, but currently, a gap exists between the two. There is a small museum dedicated to Bhojeshwar Shiva Temple and it is situated nearly 200 meters from the main temple. The museum depicts the history of Bhojeshwar Temple through posters and sketches. The museum also describes the reign of Bhoja and important books written by him as well as the mason marks. There
1887-599: The reader to read the Indic text unambiguously, exactly as if it were in the original Indic script. It is this faithfulness to the original scripts that accounts for its continuing popularity amongst scholars. Scholars commonly use IAST in publications that cite textual material in Sanskrit, Pāḷi and other classical Indian languages. IAST is also used for major e-text repositories such as SARIT, Muktabodha, GRETIL, and sanskritdocuments.org. The IAST scheme represents more than
1938-484: The remains of a dead person, conceived of as vehicles for ascent to the heaven. Such temples were called svargarohana-prasada ("temple commemorating the ascent to the svarga or heaven"). The text explicitly states that in such temples, a roof of receding tiers should be used instead of the typical shikhara. Kirit Mankodi notes that the superstructure of the Bhojpur temple would have been in this exact form upon its competition. He speculates that Bhoja may have started
1989-471: The right side of the keyboard instead of Ctrl+Alt combination). Many systems provide a way to select Unicode characters visually. ISO/IEC 14755 refers to this as a screen-selection entry method . Microsoft Windows has provided a Unicode version of the Character Map program (find it by hitting ⊞ Win + R then type charmap then hit ↵ Enter ) since version NT 4.0 – appearing in
2040-486: The romanisation of all Indic scripts , is an extension of IAST. The IAST letters are listed with their Devanagari equivalents and phonetic values in IPA , valid for Sanskrit , Hindi and other modern languages that use Devanagari script, but some phonological changes have occurred: * H is actually glottal , not velar . Some letters are modified with diacritics : Long vowels are marked with an overline (often called
2091-547: The royal fortress palaces of similar forms depicted in the stele of Naram-Sin. A plaque from Kumrahar dated 150-200 CE, based on its dated Kharoshthi inscriptions and combined finds of Huvishka coins, already shows the Mahabodhi Temple in its current shape with a stepped truncated pyramid and a stupa finial on top, together with devotional images of the Buddha and the elephant-crowned Pillar of Ashoka next to
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2142-460: The smaller Kaliasot river into the Betwa dam reservoir. This man-made reservoir existed until 15th century, when Hoshang Shah emptied the lake by breaching two of the dams. The Bhojpur temple features several peculiar elements, including the omission of a mandapa connected to the garbhagriha (sanctum), and the rectilinear roof instead of the typical curvilinear shikhara (dome tower). Three of
2193-433: The structure. To further prevent the rainwater from getting in, the ASI also closed the portion between the wall and the superstructure by placing slanting stone slabs. In addition, the ASI placed new stone veneers matching the original ones on the northern, southern and western exterior walls of the temple. The ASI also cleaned the dirt that had accumulated on the temple walls over the past few centuries. The temple lies on
2244-412: The surrounding rocks. The unfinished materials abandoned at the site, the architectural drawings carved on the rocks, and the mason's marks have helped scholars understand the temple construction techniques of 11th-century India. The temple has been designated as a Monument of National Importance by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). The Bhojpur temple is believed to have been constructed by
2295-437: The temple building, the quarry rocks and two other shrines in the village. This includes the names of 50 masons engraved on the various portions of the temple structure. Other marks are in the form of various symbols such as circle, crossed circle, wheel, trident , swastika , conch shell , and Nagari script characters. These marks were meant to identify the amount of work completed by individuals, families or guilds involved in
2346-481: The temple is in use for religious purposes. On Maha Shivaratri , thousands of devotees visit the temple. The Government of Madhya Pradesh organises the Bhojpur Utsav cultural event at the site every year around Maha Shivaratri. Past performers at the event include Kailash Kher , Richa Sharma , Ganna Smirnova , and Sonu Nigam . IAST The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration ( IAST )
2397-433: The temple weigh 33 tonnes, and are also carved out of a single stone: it must have been very challenging for the original builders to erect these pillars without modern technology and resources. The team closed the ceiling with a new architectural component matching the original one, to stop the water percolation. This fibreglass component weighs less than the original one, thus reducing unnecessary weight which could damage
2448-435: The temple's walls feature a plain exterior; there are some carvings on the entrance wall, but these are of the 12th century style. Based on these peculiarities, researcher Shri Krishna Deva proposed that the temple was a funerary monument . Deva's hypothesis was further corroborated by the discovery of a medieval architectural text by M. A. Dhaky . This fragmentary text describes the construction of memorial temples erected over
2499-504: The temple, because they are located high up on the walls, and have no openings on the interior walls. The northern wall features a makara - pranala , which provided a drainage outlet for the liquid used to bathe the lingam. Other than the sculptures on the front wall, this makara sculpture is the only carving on the external walls. 8 images of goddesses were originally placed high up on the four interior walls (two on each wall); only one of these images now remains. The four brackets supporting
2550-493: The top. The current structure dates from the Gupta Empire , in the 5th–6th century CE. When the temple acquired its shikhara tower, today considered more characteristic of Hindu temples , is uncertain. However, the current structure of the Mahabodhi Temple may represent a restoration of earlier work of the 2nd or 3rd century CE. Ernest Havell traced the origin of shikhara to Ancient Mesopotamia and referred to
2601-487: The transliteration of Indic scripts according to the IAST and ISO 15919 standards. For example, the Arial , Tahoma and Times New Roman font packages that come with Microsoft Office 2007 and later versions also support precomposed Unicode characters like ī . Many other text fonts commonly used for book production may be lacking in support for one or more characters from this block. Accordingly, many academics working in
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