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Some Inscriptions and Images on Mount Satruñjaya
AMBALAL PREMCHAND SHAH
The age of antiquity or ancient monuments is generally inferred
from the styles of architecture and sculpture and on the basis of available inscriptions. Since the temples at Satruñjaya were renovated from time to time through many centuries very little evidence of antiquity has been left for us. For want of published old inscriptions, sculptures in temples, scholars came to believe that the temple-city of Satruñjaya could hardly claim to be earlier than or even as old as the Jaina-temples-site of Delvādā, Mount Abu.
One can see several streets and rows of temples and images on Mount Satruñjaya. A common man can hardly make any distinction between the earliest and the latest specimens of art among the hundreds and thousands of images in this temple-city, where no human habitation is allowed. But the searching eye of a historian is on the look-out for all stray old inscriptions and specimens of art.
According to literary traditions, Satruñjaya is an ancient tirtha of the Jainas. In the Jñātādharmakathā, a Jaina canonical text, it is referred to as Puņdarīkagiri.1 In later Jaina literature, this place is
1 Sūtras 55, 56, 60, pp. 109, 112. Abhayadeva, the Commentator, has
identified Pundarīkagiri with modern satruñjaya (p. 111 A).
