together with the millets, barley, wheat, and oil-seeds with which they enriched the agriculture of non-Aryan India. There does not exist in India any primitive indigenous type from which the sikhara can be derived, for the temple car covered by a bambu framework in the form of sikhara can hardly be the prototype of the temple itself. But the tall conical mud huts of Mesopotamian villages are strikingly suggestive of the conical form of temple sikhara sometimes found in India.
The more usual curvilinear form of it in India is only a technical modification of structure due to the use of a bambu framework. As to the antiquity of these cone-shaped structures in Mesopotamia there can be no doubt. A group of buildings carved on a relief discovered by Layard in the Palace of Sennacherib at Nineveh (Pl. XX, a), built in the eighth century b.c., shows both the sikhara cone and the hemispherical stūpa-dome. Whether this relief represents a village or a palace, it certainly suggests the probability that both the Indo-Aryan forms were derived from Mesopotamia—a probability which is greatly increased by the recent discovery of the Aryan domination of the Euphrates valley in the second millennium b.c., and of the interesting fact that the Aryans of Mitanni, besides worshipping the Vedic gods, also venerated the Assyrian goddess Ishtar or Ashtaroth. "Verily now have I sent her (Ishtar)," writes King Dasaratha to his brother-in-law, Amenhetep III, King of Egypt, "and she is gone. Indeed, in the time of my father, the lady Ishtar went to that land; and just as she dwelt therein formerly and they honoured her, so may now my brother honour her ten times more than before."[1] This remarkable letter gives a very different account of
- ↑ History of the Near East, H. R. Hall, p. 197.
