Ali Usman Baig

25th February 2018

Partially cleared in 1920 by the Archaeological Survey the 'ruined plinth of Temple at Amb is large enough for there to have been a substantial pillared hall in front of surviving vestibule. Daya Ram Sahni reset the stones of a stairway on the west but recommended no attempt be made to replace flanking structures for lack of any evidence of their nature. He compared the remnants of the platform surface to "stupa plinths in Gandhara" and the remnants of the platforms' surface to "stupa plinths in Gandhara". Whether or not Temple B reused an earlier plinth, as seems to have occurred at Katas and Nandana cannot be determined from the remains, Coins, and sculptures found in the fort, however, confirm the ancient and continuing occupation of the site.

Kashmir reminded remarkably insular in developing its bi-level peak-roofed temple form. A few limited quotations from the Nagara decorative repertory of the plains. an occasional amalaka or candrasala- crept into the ninth/tenth century. Kashmir decoration Architects in the Salta Range and along the Indus were more open and experimental (Meister 1997). In addition to developing a unique formulation for late Gandhara-Nagra temples at Katas, Amb, Bilot, and Nandana in the tenth century, these architects built several unique and instructive experiments in the tenth century that need a separate description.

At Amb lacking ethnographic or further archaeological opportunities, Ahmad Ghazali 1993, suggests of the long potency of the site. Archaeology may further reveal the early history of this fortress and its use by Kushan’s, Buddhists, and Hindus in the Shahi period

Cunningham 1882 reported that " There are no statues now remaining, but I saw one small figure 10 1/4 inches in height, or a yellowish grey stone, which was found in the Dhodha Nala, at the foot of the fort, after a landslip had taken place." This is probably a figure ascribed to Amb on display in the Lahore Museum. The museum's registry gives the dimensions of this place as 13 inches x 4 inches. Wilson 1897 recorded that in "1888 three pieces of sculpture were found near the entrance to one of the temples that have been deposited in the Lahore Museum," although these cannot be tracked. Daya Ram Sahni 1921, however, published three sculptures discovered from the rubble surrounding the large platform on which Temple B was Built. One he called "Mahadeva", the others are a plaque with animal figures and an image of Narasimha. These are not in one style or of a single period, nor likely part of either of the two standing temples, which they seem to precede. They do provide a symptom of the complexity of peoples using the fort over time and of fertile schools of carving now lost to us. Filingenzi commented, "We are still far from a good knowledge of weha we can generically call, for the sake of caution, post Gandharan art, in which we see different regions involved in an undeniable but complex koine, whose common and original features are not yet fully understood".

Cunningham 1882: 33-35 describes the old town of Amb, " Situated inside the Salt Range and quite out of sight of plains."

The Dhodha Nala flows between Amb and Sakesar, and almost the flat top hill stands the old fort of Amb. The town consists of two portions, the upper half is situated on top of the hill to the south of the fort, and lower at the foot of the fort hill. the midst of a wood of green trees with a fid spring of pure which alone would have led to the early occupation of this place in salt hills.

The Hindu Shahis stood at a face-off against the Ghaznavids, under Anandpal’s leadership, for one ultimate time, primarily to decide the fate of the nation, the northern boundaries of what they stood guarding for almost two centuries: Hindustan! With Jayapaldeva’s humiliating defeat at the hands of Mahmud in 1001 CE, Anandpal, Jayapal’s son and a favorable successor of the centuries-old Hindu Shahis had come forward to lead a confederacy of the local rajahs and the almost extirpated Kshatriyas, against Mahmud. An intense battle was what kicked off next, on the rugged fertile plains of Chhachh, (“a region located between Peshawar and Islamabad at the northern tip of Attock”), in which Anandpal, the king who was then considered an invincible descendant of Porus, ended the battle the similar way his probable ancestor had ended one with Alexander, thirteen hundred years ago: a truce! History had to repeat itself and once again, the boundaries of the nation fell short for keeping the invaders at bay. Mahmud returned pompous and his purpose to loot the moneyed kingdoms of Hindustan, was partially accomplished.

Two years later, in 1010 CE, Anandpal, the king upon whose tactics the masses had placed their hopes high, passed away under normal circumstances, and a massive financial and territorial possession of the Hindu Shahis was lost to Ghazni.

Trilochanapala, son of the great king, sat on the gilded throne next but failed miserably to restore the dynastic prestige to its previous stature. Executed by his own soldiers in 1021 CE, he was succeeded by Bhimpala of whom not much is known other than the fact that he was possibly the very last of the once-powerful Hindu Shahis. With his death, the empire that once stood guarding the borders of Hindustan like none other, faded away into uncertainty and was absorbed by internal conflicts and foreign invasions that led to the rise of the Saffarids, the Samanids, and the Ghaznavids.

Their monumental forts and palaces soon waned into desolation, dying in despondency, and the region, culturally and religiously now, populated with people of the Islamic faith, failed even to recall the once massive temples (Tilla Jogian, Nandana, Katas, Malot, Amb, Kafir Kot, and others) dotting the Sakesar Salt range.

Salman Rashid, in his work entitled, “The Salt Range and the Potohar Plateau” describes in detail, the ruins of the two temples that are considered to constitute the Amb Temple Complex. The main temple is observed to be around “eighteen meters through three stories” and is probably “the loftiest of all Hindu Shahya edifices in the Salt Range. It is imposing, too, because of the bulky pillars fronting it and giving it a clear Greco-Roman appearance. Made of the same pale gray limestone, the pillars appear to be part of the original building plan. Closer inspection reveals the jagged remnants of a vaulted foyer that once afforded entry to the main chamber.”

Sadly, there exists no established view to date, regarding who originally built the temples. Alexander Cunningham is said to have visited the site in the early 1860s and inspected the area for a certain stone tablet (something that probably had an inscription on it) that purportedly went missing and was never recovered!

However, there are two separate views on the origins of the temple complex, one by Cunningham himself, after having been informed of transliterations of the missing stone tablet by a Brahmin, and the other by Orientalist Colonel James Tod, as penned down in his famed work, “Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan”.

Cunningham credits Raja Ambarikha, the son of Mandhatari, a Suryavanshi Rajput with the establishment of both the temple and the city, in around the 1st century CE.

Similarly, Colonel James Tod opines that this place was established not by Ambarikha, but by one Ambarisha, fortieth in the line of the glorious Sun Lineage princes.

Taking both views into consideration when writing about the temple and its origins, Salman Rashid, the noted travel writer, dismisses both of them and propounds his own theory of the establishment of the temple.

He quotes, “The truth is that Amb, like the other Hindu Shahya temples of the Salt Range, was built after the annexation of this part of the country by the great Kashmirian conqueror Durlabhaka Pratapaditya in the 7th century AD. Even then, unfortunately for the chronology given on the purported stone slab, one infallible dating element in the building shows that the temples of Amb were not built until about the end of the 10th century. The cinquefoil arch that repeatedly appears in the niches on the facades as well as on the entrance of the smaller temple – as surely as it would have crowned the now obliterated entrance vault of the larger building – is posterior to the trefoil arch seen at Malot. This element, the natural outcome of experimentation with embellishment and elaboration, followed in the course of development of the earlier trefoil arch and marks all later Hindu Shahya buildings in the area.”

Talking about Pratapaditya, the Kashmiri conqueror in whose support Rashid has put his views forward, art historian Michael Meister, in his work entitled “Fig Gardens of Amb-Sharif, Folklore and Archaeology”, published by Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente, observes Kashmiri motifs on the exteriors of the temple architecture, sometimes including a cusped niche, something that affirms what Salman Rashid propounded in his work.

However, going by what W.S. Talbot, ICS, in his paper, “An Ancient Hindu Temple in the Panjab”, published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1903, states, the resources that support the Kashmiri theory, are proved insufficient enough to be considered established! Talbot intricately observes that the architectural get-up of the main temple differs much from what we know as the Kashmiri Style (temple with sloping and pointed rooftop) and is more or less similar to the Kalar and Kafir Kot temples in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province.

As for the temple complex, there were two other temples, smaller in size (around seven to eight meters in height), located some seventy-five meters away from the primary structure, atop a cliff with a vestibule chamber overlooking the main temple complex. One of these smaller temples survives to date whereas there’s almost no visible sign of the other ever existed. Furthermore, the temples, having been built upon an elevated hillock, could have possibly provided for military support too, evident from the now demolished fortifications around the temple ramparts, the earliest of which, date back to the Kushan period.