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Kailasa Temple


LucidElement

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Kailasa Temple, part of the Ellora Caves in Maharashtra, India. Believed to b e the largest monolithic structure carved from a single rock and fabled to have been built in a single week as a tribute to Lord Shiva. What are your thoughts on that? I look at it and think one week!? No way lol. But then again, look at ancient structures they are always baffling.

 

 

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it is believed it was built as a tribute to the divine Lord Shiva, to symbolize his home on Mount Kailash in the Himalayas. And the legend says it was due to a death threatening sickness a king had, and his queen’s determination to build Shiva a temple if only her deity would answer her prayers and save her poor husband from the inevitable. Time was running out and so if this was to happen it had to be completed in no more than a week. And while many saw it as an impossible task, according to the Marathi people and this legend of theirs, an architect named Kokasa had a perfect solution in mind and built the temple within a week as he promised he would, carving a mountain from its top downwards. Thanks to him and his inventiveness, the king was saved, or so the legend goes.

Link: https://www.thevintagenews.com/2017/11/28/the-ancient-kailasa-temple/

 

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That has to be a legend.   Seems like I've read elsewhere that it was worked on for a very long time.

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I can imagine the design brief was “and you’re going to do it in a week” and the engineer in charge said “yeah sure Chief, no worries”. 

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2 hours ago, Sir Wearer of Hats said:

I can imagine the design brief was “and you’re going to do it in a week” and the engineer in charge said “yeah sure Chief, no worries”. 

Not if was Union labor. It would take them a week just to unroll the schematics.

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19 minutes ago, kmt_sesh said:

Not if was Union labor. It would take them a week just to unroll the schematics.

First the fatasses would have to negotiate how many breaks they would get. Then their foreman would have to drink 3 Monster energy drinks just to get the energy to unroll it.  Then after looking at it, he would complain to the local Democrat Assemblyman that they were being overworked....

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I am surprised the comments have been sarcastic, because there is a really cool piece of ancient history out there and we are still trying to figure out the dynamics of it. And Now you have to consider the fable or as people would say the legend, that describes why it was put up in the first place. It’s pretty fascinating , So that is why I shared it with the UM community.

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6 hours ago, Piney said:

First the fatasses would have to negotiate how many breaks they would get. Then their foreman would have to drink 3 Monster energy drinks just to get the energy to unroll it.  Then after looking at it, he would complain to the local Democrat Assemblyman that they were being overworked....

Sarcasm

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I don't know anything about, but I can't accept anything like that was build in a week. Even if they had hundreds and thousands of workers.

It is an epic monument.

Edited by danydandan
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3 hours ago, LucidElement said:

Sarcasm

Real happenings in New Jersey...

Edited by Piney
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15 hours ago, LucidElement said:

I am surprised the comments have been sarcastic, because there is a really cool piece of ancient history out there and we are still trying to figure out the dynamics of it. And Now you have to consider the fable or as people would say the legend, that describes why it was put up in the first place. It’s pretty fascinating , So that is why I shared it with the UM community.

im not surprised by the comments that are upsetting you in the least. been there done that. excellent post and what a stunning temple complex. built in a week? wow it would be incredible if the ancients had such organisational skills. 

 

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Built in a week is a fable, as the OP indicated.

The stone is Tuff, a crumbly ashy volcanic stone that you can carve with your fingernail.

Watch that hangnail.

Harte

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16 hours ago, LucidElement said:

I am surprised the comments have been sarcastic, because there is a really cool piece of ancient history out there and we are still trying to figure out the dynamics of it. And Now you have to consider the fable or as people would say the legend, that describes why it was put up in the first place. It’s pretty fascinating , So that is why I shared it with the UM community.

Lucid, what are we to say? It's absolutely absurd to consider that it was built in a week. Of course it wasn't.

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@LucidElement, the week you’re referring to seems to be this: ‘One architect named Kokasa assured the king that the queen would be able to see the shikhara of a temple within a week's time. He started building the temple from the top, by carving a rock. He was able to finish the shikhara within a week's time, enabling the queen to give up her fast.’

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kailasa_temple,_Ellora for more info. 

So, you seem to have confused yourself.

The above quote is also based on a legend, so it still may have no factual basis in reality.

Edited by Timothy
Formatting.
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On 9/1/2018 at 7:53 PM, kmt_sesh said:

Lucid, what are we to say? It's absolutely absurd to consider that it was built in a week. Of course it wasn't.

I know it most likely wasn’t built in a week. I was just trying to hear peoples thoughts on it in general, not so much target the length of a week to build it/.

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On 9/1/2018 at 8:31 PM, Timothy said:

@LucidElement, the week you’re referring to seems to be this: ‘One architect named Kokasa assured the king that the queen would be able to see the shikhara of a temple within a week's time. He started building the temple from the top, by carving a rock. He was able to finish the shikhara within a week's time, enabling the queen to give up her fast.’

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kailasa_temple,_Ellora for more info. 

So, you seem to have confused yourself.

The above quote is also based on a legend, so it still may have no factual basis in reality.

I understand it’s a fable, I put it in my original post. I was just curious to know what you guys thought about the structure and any other interesting tidbits.

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1 hour ago, LucidElement said:

I understand it’s a fable, I put it in my original post. I was just curious to know what you guys thought about the structure and any other interesting tidbits.

Well if you actually asked that, the thread would look quite different to what it does now. :rofl:

Surely, reading it again, you can see why.

As for the structure itself and how it was built, it’s very impressive indeed, and would have taken years. 

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On 01/09/2018 at 7:53 AM, LucidElement said:

I am surprised the comments have been sarcastic, because there is a really cool piece of ancient history out there and we are still trying to figure out the dynamics of it. And Now you have to consider the fable or as people would say the legend, that describes why it was put up in the first place. It’s pretty fascinating , So that is why I shared it with the UM community.

Remember in those times and days people lived a lot differently from us. They had the time to build.....this would have certainly taken more than a week.

Buildings then where built with thr resources of the area, so if they could find stone, they built with stone. 

People were not travelling  to work to other places and did not spend their time going shopping or on the internet, they had the man power and time to spend on building these impressive structures. 

How times have changed. In terms of building and our social lifestyles.

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On 9/2/2018 at 12:57 AM, Captain Risky said:

im not surprised by the comments that are upsetting you in the least. been there done that. excellent post and what a stunning temple complex. built in a week? wow it would be incredible if the ancients had such organisational skills. 

 

I think you mean would be impossible not incredible? 

The scale and size of it and given the time period etc nothing ever in the history of man on that scale has been built in a week, I mean look at France and the "older" buildings there these took years to complete over generations. So it is very very doubtful given what we know of ancient structures that this was done in a week. Even if there were heavy modern equipment this would have take far longer than a few days. I mean to re-surface a road (yes I know I live in Africa) takes about 20 days per 1.5kms and thats just laying down a new layer of tar. To do this temple would have taken years not days.

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...depends on what your definition of a temple is...maybe the top part was built in a week and the rest done afterwards so the queen would t starve to death...which would have been self defeating.

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Who would of though they had huge 3d printers in them times, how else can they make this monolith in 1 week

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Maybe it was done faster than we would think if it is soft stone like Harte said, but it still is a stunning achievement however long it took. A week seems too much to believe though but that is the fun of legends :) and I enjoyed the backstory to it. Thanks.

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Wouldn't have been that easy.

But it much easier than it would have been if it was, for example, granite.

Harte

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