Lauria Nandangarh
Lauria Nandangarh is a town in West Champaram with historical and archaeological significance. Lauria Nandangarh boasts of the remains ot a huge stupa named Nandangarh. This
stupa is 26 metre high, and is conjectured to be Ashes Stupa, in which ashes of Buddha were enshrined.
Another attraction is Ashokan Pillar (32 ft high), \Which is a single block of polished sandstone. Its bell-shaped capital, with a circular abacus, supports the statue. This pillar is to the east ofthe town.
Lauria Nandangarh is 24 km north-west of Bettiah.
Other nearby towns are Patilar to the west, Tikulia to the
east and Ramnagar and Mujra to the north. Patna airpat
and Bettiah railway station are the nearest access points.
There are at Lauria, besides an inscribed Ashokan Pillar,
15 Stupa mounds.
Four of them were excavated in 1904-07 and as two
of them yielded a deposit of burnt bones with charcoil
and a gold leaf with a Mother-Goddess figure (akin to
the one from Piprahwa), they were regarded by the
excavator to be Vedic burial tumuli. As a result of their reexamination in 1935-37, they were definitel, recognised
to be Stupas of mud or mud-bricks with baked-brick
revetments (in two cases with actual brick-lining).
They were regarded as roughly conteporary with the Piprahwa Stupa on account of the analogous find of
the Mother-Goddess figure on the gold leaf.
Nandangarh, about two km from the Ashokan Pillar,
represents a fortified habitation site. At one end of the
site was excavated a large brick Stupa, reared up on multiple polygonal terraces with numerous re-entrant
angles.This edifice, of the early centuries AD, is the earliest example of a form of terraced Stupa, which culminated in the celebrated monuments of Paharpur in East
Pakistan and Borobudur in Java.
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