name of Jannatabad; it remained so as long as the Mahommedan kings retained their independence. In A.D. 1564 Sulaiman Kirani, a Pathan adventurer, abandoned it for Tanda, a place somewhat nearer the Ganges. Gaur was sacked by Sher Shah in 1539, and was occupied by Akbar’s general in 1575, when Daud Shah, the last of the Afghan dynasty, refused to pay homage to the Mogul emperor. This occupation was followed by an outbreak of the plague, which completed the downfall of the city, and since then it has been little better than a heap of ruins, almost overgrown with jungle.
The city in its prime measured 712 m. from north to south, with a breadth of 1 to 2 m. With suburbs it covered an area of 20 to 30 sq. m., and in the 16th century the Portuguese historian Faria y Sousa described it as containing 1,200,000 inhabitants. The ramparts of this walled city, which was surrounded by extensive suburbs, still exist; they were works of vast labour, and were on the average about 40 ft. high, and 180 to 200 ft. thick at the base. The facing of masonry and the buildings with which they were covered have now disappeared, and the embankments themselves are overgrown with dense jungle. The western side of the city was washed by the Ganges, and within the space enclosed by these embankments and the river stood the city of Gaur proper, with the fort containing the palace in its south-west corner. Radiating north, south and east from the city, other embankments are to be traced running through the suburbs and extending in certain directions for 30 or 40 m. Surrounding the palace is an inner embankment of similar construction to that which surrounds the city, and even more overgrown with jungle. A deep moat protects it on the outside. To the north of the outer embankment lies the Sagar Dighi, a great reservoir, 1600 yds. by 800 yds., dating from A.D. 1126.
Fergusson in his History of Eastern Architecture thus describes the general architectural style of Gaur:—“It is neither like that of Delhi nor Jaunpore, nor any other style, but one purely local and not without considerable merit in itself; its principal characteristic being heavy short pillars of stone supporting pointed arches and vaults in brick—whereas at Jaunpore, for instance, light pillars carried horizontal architraves and flat ceilings.” Owing to the lightness of the small, thin bricks, which were chiefly used in the making of Gaur, its buildings have not well withstood the ravages of time and the weather; while much of its enamelled work has been removed for the ornamentation of the surrounding cities of more modern origin. Moreover, the ruins long served as a quarry for the builders of neighbouring towns and villages, till in 1900 steps were taken for their preservation by the government. The finest ruin in Gaur is that of the Great Golden Mosque, also called Bara Darwaza, or twelve-doored (1526). An arched corridor running along the whole front of the original building is the principal portion now standing. There are eleven arches on either side of the corridor and one at each end of it, from which the mosque probably obtained its name. These arches are surmounted by eleven domes in fair preservation; the mosque had originally thirty-three.
The Small Golden or Eunuch’s mosque, in the ancient suburb of Firozpur, has fine carving, and is faced with stone fairly well preserved. The Tantipara mosque (1475–1480) has beautiful moulding in brick, and the Lotan mosque of the same period is unique in retaining its glazed tiles. The citadel, of the Mahommedan period, was strongly fortified with a rampart and entered through a magnificent gateway called the Dakhil Darwaza (?1459–1474). At the south-east corner was a palace, surrounded by a wall of brick 66 ft. high, of which a part is standing. Near by were the royal tombs. Within the citadel is the Kadam Rasul mosque (1530), which is still used, and close outside is a tall tower called the Firoz Minar (perhaps signifying “tower of victory”). There are a number of Mahommedan buildings on the banks of the Sagar Dighi, including, notably, the tomb of the saint Makhdum Shaikh Akhi Siraj (d. 1357), and in the neighbourhood is a burning ghat, traditionally the only one allowed to the use of the Hindus by their Mahommedan conquerors, and still greatly venerated and frequented by them. Many inscriptions of historical importance have been found in the ruins.
See M. Martin (Buchanan Hamilton), Eastern India, vol. iii. (1831); G. H. Ravenshaw, Gaur (1878); James Fergusson, History of Indian and Eastern Architecture (1876); Reports of the Archaeological Surveyor, Bengal Circle (1900–1904).
GAUR, the native name of the wild ox, Bos (Bibos) gaurus, of India, miscalled bison by sportsmen. The gaur, which extends into Burma and the Malay Peninsula, where it is known as seladang, is the typical representative of an Indo-Malay group of wild cattle characterized by the presence of a ridge on the withers, the compressed horns, and the white legs. The gaur, which reaches a height of nearly 6 ft. at the shoulder, is specially characterized by the forward curve and great elevation of the ridge between the horns. The general colour is blackish-grey. Hill-forests are the resort of this species.
GAUSS, KARL FRIEDRICH (1777–1855), German mathematician,
was born of humble parents at Brunswick on the 30th
of April 1777, and was indebted for a liberal education to the
notice which his talents procured him from the reigning duke.
His name became widely known by the publication, in his
twenty-fifth year (1801), of the Disquisitiones arithmeticae.
In 1807 he was appointed director of the Göttingen observatory,
an office which he retained to his death: it is said that he never
slept away from under the roof of his observatory, except on
one occasion, when he accepted an invitation from Baron von
Humboldt to attend a meeting of natural philosophers at Berlin.
In 1809 he published at Hamburg his Theoria motus corporum
coelestium, a work which gave a powerful impulse to the true
methods of astronomical observation; and his astronomical
workings, observations, calculations of orbits of planets and
comets, &c., are very numerous and valuable. He continued
his labours in the theory of numbers and other analytical subjects,
and communicated a long series of memoirs to the Royal Society
of Sciences (Königliche Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften) at
Göttingen. His first memoir on the theory of magnetism,
Intensitas vis magneticae terrestris ad mensuram absolutam
revocata, was published in 1833, and he shortly afterwards
proceeded, in conjunction with Wilhelm Weber, to invent new
apparatus for observing the earth’s magnetism and its changes;
the instruments devised by them were the declination instrument
and the bifilar magnetometer. With Weber’s assistance he
erected in 1833 at Göttingen a magnetic observatory free from
iron (as Humboldt and F. J. D. Arago had previously done on a
smaller scale), where he made magnetic observations, and from
this same observatory he sent telegraphic signals to the neighbouring
town, thus showing the practicability of an electromagnetic
telegraph. He further instituted an association (Magnetischer
Verein), composed at first almost entirely of Germans, whose
continuous observations on fixed term-days extended from
Holland to Sicily. The volumes of their publication, Resultate
aus den Beobachtungen des magnetischen Vereins, extend from
1836 to 1839; and in those for 1838 and 1839 are contained the
two important memoirs by Gauss, Allgemeine Theorie des Erdmagnetismus,
and the Allgemeine Lehrsätze—on the theory of forces attracting according to the inverse square of the distance. The instruments and methods thus due to him are substantially those employed in the magnetic observatories throughout the world. He co-operated in the Danish and Hanoverian measurements of an arc and trigonometrical operations (1821–1848), and wrote (1843, 1846) the two memoirs Über Gegenstände der höheren Geodäsie. Connected with observations in general we have (1812–1826) the memoir Theoria combinationis observationum erroribus minimis obnoxia, with a second part and a supplement. Another memoir of applied mathematics is the Dioptrische Untersuchungen (1840). Gauss was well versed in general literature and the chief languages of modern Europe, and was a member of nearly all the leading scientific societies in Europe. He died at Göttingen on the 23rd of February 1855. The centenary of his birth was celebrated (1877) at his native place, Brunswick.
Gauss’s collected works were published by the Royal Society of Göttingen, in 7 vols. 4to (Gött., 1863–1871), edited by E. J. Schering—(1)
