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ART. IX.—Some Remarks on the Great Tope at Sânchi
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2011
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Dr. Fergusson's book on “Tree and Serpent Worship” has opened a large field for inquiry and research. After looking through the photographs and lithographed scenes relating to the Sânchi Topes, two questions naturally suggest themselves, viz.: What was the idea which suggested the peculiar form of the Indian Tope? and, What are the scenes so carefully represented on the rails and gateways at Sanchi and Amravati ?
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page 165 note 1 I refer to Logan stones, etc., but principally to those primitive structures called “Baltulia.” I take the rows of stones represented in p. 206 of sir J. Lubbock's work “On the Origin of Civilization, etc.,” to be Boetylia, or “anointed stones”—the red mark round the black (which Colonel Forbes Leslie compares to “spots of blood”) being in fact the “marks of consecration” or “anointing.” It is well known that “idols” or “josses” in China are consecrated by a dash of red or vermilion across the eye. With regard to the derivation of the word “Boetylia” as signifying “elemental stones,” whilst it is generally referred to a Semitic root, I venture to suggest 
or 
as denoting that these stones in the first instance represented the “Elemental World.”
page 165 note 2 These ayes evidently denote the watchful care of the “Four Kings” (Chaturmahârâjahs) over the affairs of men.
page 166 note 1 Compare the remarks of MrBaring-Gould, (“Origin of Keligious Beliefs,” pp. 98, 99)Google Scholar: “The localization of the Deity in heaven gave birth to a number of other names. From the first moment that the consciousness of a God rose upon man's soul, like the morning sun, he lifted his head on high and sought him in the sky. That vast uplifted sphere, now radiant with light, now twinkling with countless stars, attracted the wonder of man, and in it he placed the home of his gods. Heaven was an upper world inhabited by Deities. The Esth supposed it to be a blue Tent, behind which Ukko the Ancient, and the sustainers of Sun, Moon, and Stars and the guardians of the clouds, dwelt in splendour. Men for a long time supposed that the earth was a flat plane, surrounded by the sea, and that the sky was a roof on which the heavenly bodies travel, and from which they are suspended as Lamps. The Polynesians, who thought, like so many other peoples, ancient and modern, that the sky descended at the horizon and inclosed the earth, still call foreigners papalanga, or heaven-bursters, as haying broken in from another world outside. The sky is to most savages what is called in a South American language mumeseke, that is, the-earth-on-high [compare “heaven,” that which is “heaved up”]. There are holes or windows through this roof or firmament, where the rain comes through, and if you can climb high enough, you can get through and visit the dwellers above, who live, and talk, and look, very much like people upon earth.”
page 167 note 1 Translated, we must remember, from Sanscrit.
page 168 note 1 This expansion is fully related in all the later Sîtras. Vid. e.gr., Lotus, p. 113.
page 169 note 1 In cases where the Nâga, the Horse, the Throne, etc., occupy the place of honour on the Dagoba (as in Plates Lxxx., xci., etc., Tree and Serpent Wonship), I should suppose the association to be with the history of Nuchilinda, Kaṇṭaka, the Vajrâsâna, etc.
page 178 note 1 Dr. Fergusson however does not agree with this, and I do not wish to urge it.
page 180 note 1 Compare the result of the food given by Thetia to the infant Phoibos (Coxe, , Mythology of the Aryan Nations, vol. ii. p. 22Google Scholar).