THE SHARQI ARCHITECTURE OF JAUNPUR

The author reveals that this volume is the first of the new series of Reports, begun after the reorganisation of the Archaeological Surveys in Upper India in 1885. In directing these Surveys, his aim has been to have the Report volumes, as far as practicable, exhaustive and final on the subjects treated of in each. Much of course will be discovered everywhere in the future; but the monumental archaeology can be fully dealt with, and a report consisting chiefly of cursory notes on places visited on a flying tour, with rough drawings and photographs of the more notable buildings and sculptures met with, and speculations on matters on which the surveyor does not possess the materials for anything better than a mere hypothesis more curious than scientific is not what ought to be considered satisfactory. Government has wisely forbidden the indulgence of the propensity to start such profitless speculations by the surveyors in their reports; and this volume will be found to be a plain statement of historical facts based on original sources of information relating to the places and buildings described, with careful and accurate representations of the monuments and their details sufficient to illustrate themif not in every detail, yet quite as fully as is needed to give a complete idea of their architecture. Besides the monograph on the Sharqi architecture of Jaunpur, the report contains notes on the archaeological remains at Zafarabad, BhullaTal, Ayodhya, and SahetMahet, which places he visited in the course of his tour. The plates have been reproduced by photolithographic processes at the Survey of India Office in Calcutta, but on account of other and more pressing demands,to which those plates had often to give way,?the work has been much protracted.