A barrel-vaulted thatched house in rural India today. After the collapse of the Harappan civilization about 2000 BC, for hundreds of years there were no more cities in India. Instead, people lived in [...]
Delhi Sultanate architecture - Quwat ul-Islam, Delhi, 1196 AD The first mosques in India Beginning about 1100 AD, invaders from the Abbasid Empire conquered most of northern India. These invaders were Muslims. Muslims needed mosques [...]
Osian Sun temple, 700s AD Two styles of temples: north and south By the 700s AD, after the collapse of the Guptan Empire, there were two different styles of temple-building in India, [...]
Sanchi stupa, 250 BC - Mauryan architecture New Buddhist buildings When people in India began to follow the Buddhist religion, they needed new kinds of buildings that reflected Buddhist ideas. The [...]
Early Indian architecture: Rock-cut temples at Ajanta, India The Stone Age and the Bronze Age The earliest buildings anyone knows of from India are from Mehrgahr, from about 7000 BC. But the [...]
Harappan architecture: Bath building at Mohenjo-Daro, 2500 BC Early houses in India The earliest big buildings in India were built by the Harappan people in the Indus River valley, about 2500 BC. The Harappan [...]
Guptan temples: Tigawa temple, 350 AD The first free-standing stone temples When the Mauryan empire collapsed, about 200 BC, for more than five hundred years Indian leaders were too busy fighting wars against each [...]
Outside of Carpenter's Cave, Ellora Caves, about 575 AD Guptan architecture In the Guptan period, architects in India were beginning to build more and more temples. The earlier Buddhist temples at Ajanta were [...]
Nomos and physis: Laocoon: being strangled by snakes People in ancient Greece often thought of the world as being a fight, or an agon, between the two forces of rationalism [...]
Theater of Dionysos on the Acropolis below the Parthenon in Athens The earliest Greek theaters, probably as early as the Stone Age, were just grassy hillsides with a flat place [...]
