The sea claimed an ancient capital of India. Now it has given it back

The Independent ^ | 14 February 2005 | Jan McGirk

[CarrotAndStick]

Two granite lions placed as guardians of an ancient city proved impotent before the power of the sea. But that same force has brought them to light centuries later.

The Boxing Day tsunami has revealed what archaeologists believe to be the lost ruins of an ancient city off Tamil Nadu in Southern India.

The 30-metre waves, which reshaped the Bay of Bengal and swept more than 16,000 Indians to their deaths, shifted thousands of tons of sand to unearth the pair of elaborately carved stone lions near the 7th-century Dravidian Shore Temple at Mahabalipuram.

Indian archaeologists believe these granite beasts once guarded a small port city under the Pallava dynasty, which ruled much of southern India from 100BC to AD800. The six-foot high lion statues, each hewn from a single piece of granite, are breathtakingly lifelike. One great stone cat sits up alert while the other is poised to pounce.

Two foundation walls also remain visible beneath the murky waters.

The tsunami also desilted a large bas-relief stone panel close to the Shore Temple. The half-completed sculpted elephant scoured clean by the waves now attracts mobs of visitors who touch its eroded trunk as a good luck talisman.

Scientists from the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) are descending on the World Heritage temple complex of Mahabalipuram, south of Madras, to examine these relics and to launch an underwater survey.

They were discovered by a fishermen who survived the disaster when he was catapulted aloft by the tsunami and reportedly clung for hours to the great arch of the Shore Temple. He spotted the undersea structures from this perch and told district authorities.

Marine archaeologists have been working with divers from Delhi and a team from the Scientific Exploration Society in Dorset to search for any remnants of this ancient port since April 2002.

"The sea has thrown up evidence of the grandeur of the Pallava dynasty," the superintendent ASI archaeologist, T Sathiamoorthy, said last week. "We're all excited about these finds."

Sailors used to refer to Mahabalipuram as the "Seven Pagodas". 14 February 2005 09:04

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[PilloryHillary]

bump for later reading. thanks.

[BlackVeil]

There are also stories of underwater cities off the coast of Japan, buried by previous tidal waves.

[Fedora]

Not sure if this is the same article on this from before but ping in case not.

[I'm ALL Right!]

DARN! I was hoping for pics.

[nuconvert]

link problem

[CarrotAndStick]

Are you sure? Cut and paste andd try a Google search.

[CarrotAndStick]

It's loading on mine, but it could be loading from cache. Besides, this is a cut-and-paste from an email a friend sent me. He may have typed the URL wrong.

[jocon307]

"I was hoping for pics."

Yes, I'd like to see those too!

Especially the lions, they sound quite cool and kitty like!

[CarrotAndStick]

Link to article:

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/story.jsp?story=610870

[nuconvert]

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/story.jsp?story=610870

[nuconvert]

lol. Well, we have it now......

[SquirrelKing]

For all those hunting pics:

Don't look like much, but cool anyway.

[cake_crumb]

Wow, I didn't know President Bush was a thousand years old! He's been doing that evil tsunami stuff for a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOG time.

[montag813]

The Boxing Day tsunami has revealed what archaeologists believe to be the lost ruins of an ancient city off Tamil Nadu in Southern India.

Can't wait for the "Hindu Leader Says Shiva Caused Tsunamis to Reveal Statues"...to add with all the other idiotic "religious" pronouncements regarding this event.

[cake_crumb]

Don't forget the Hindu Times claims that aliens living deep beneath the Himalayas caused the earthquake that caused the tsunami.

[blam]

"There are also stories of underwater cities off the coast of Japan, buried by previous tidal waves."

Those are natural structures (Re: Dr Robert Schoch, geologist/geophysist), not ancient pyramids, and they were covered by the Ice Age melt, not tidal waves.

[blam]

We're not suppose to post articles from The Independent. Copyright complaint.

[sully777]

The half-completed sculpted elephant scoured clean by the waves now attracts mobs of visitors who touch its eroded trunk as a good luck talisman.

---

So, the tsunami that killed 16,000 of their fellow Indians

but revealed this set of sculptures at a temple that was engulfed and destroyed by a similar past tsunami

is good luck

not bad luck

if you rub its lifeless trunk.




Right?! Hold on, just writing down reason number 1,937 why I'm not Hindu.

[Outland]

"We're not suppose to post articles from The Independent. Copyright complaint."

An article posted in it's entirety is a no-no without the agreement of the copyright holder, but small excerpts are okay.

One interesting bit of confusion exists on websites where they give you the option for a "printer fiendly version". This implies that its okay to "print", but in a digital medium, "print" can also mean "print to file".

The New Zealand Herald, for example, routinely offers a "printer friendly version" of it's headline stories. But on those pages you will see "You may not reproduce, publish, electronically archive or transmit this article in any manner without the prior written consent of the New Zealand Herald." They offer you a version to "print" while at the same time, they tell you that you can't print it. I'd say the latter would lose over the former in a court case since the option to "print" was after all, being offered first.

In another vein, most everyone that surfs for news must be a copyright law breaker since what is viewed is often cached. As for me, no one is touching my gigabytes of archived online news. Thank you, Adobe Acrobat.