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True Valor
At Bhojpur the temple was never finished, the construction ramp is still standing, and the architect’s drawings are carved into the rock beside it.
He is credited with eighty-four books, and the list of subjects is the reason people find him hard to believe.
Poetics. Grammar. Architecture and engineering. Astronomy. Medicine. Chemistry. Yoga. Town planning. Hydraulics. Mechanical devices. Raja Bhoja of the Paramaras ruled Malwa from Dhara, modern Dhar, from about 1010 to 1055.
And he wrote across the whole of that range while doing it.
The Samarangana Sutradhara is a treatise on architecture and mechanics. It covers town planning, temple construction, and the classification of building types.
And a section on yantras, mechanical devices. Including descriptions of mechanisms that have kept engineers and historians of technology arguing for a century.
The Sarasvati Kanthabharana is a work on poetics and rhetoric that remained a standard reference in Sanskrit literary theory for centuries afterwards.
These are not attributions of convenience to a famous name. They are technical works of a demanding kind.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.