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Comment by yantrams | Hacker News Reader

I've seen the same phenomena in dozens of ancient temples in India I had the chance to visit, often attributed to Islamic conquests. The native Hindu rulers weren't any less sparing either when they conquered their rivals who worshipped a different deity.

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Same thing was common in Mesopotamia: There is a "breath of life" theme in the ancient mythology of the middle east that is closely related to the destruction of noses. This believe is ridiculed in the Hadith, which leads many to the conclusion that the damage must be pre-islamic, as islam would either completely destroy it or not at all, but i think that highly underrates the strong mysticism and superstition of late-ancient culture and overrates how quickly one culture replaces another while ignoring how that is accomplished in practice. Destruction of iconography during culture shifts was common in the area that spawned islam. Attacking the nose has become uncommon once they stopped making noses, so yes they kinda stopped it, but even today destruction of iconography, especially if it has religious meaning, is a very muslim thing. It is about asserting dominance and a visibly disfigured and broken statue can be better at that then one that is gone.

What you tend to see in India is the deliberate desecration of carvings - smashing in faces and breaking hands.

Hindu rulers tended not to do these kinds of specific acts. You could probably count on one hand the "Indic" kings documented to have specifically targeted temples or religious iconography. The most famous examples that come to mind immediately would be the razing of the temples of Pratihaspura, allegedly to smoke out a rival hiding in the ruins.

> You could probably count on one hand the "Indic" kings documented to have specifically targeted temples or religious iconography.

This is more of a statement about the quality of the historical record in India (which is abysmally low).

Not really. The rival Indic traditions were quick to note slip-ups and wrongdoings by their rivals. For example, the rivalry between the Vaishnavite & Shaivite traditions in South India is well documented. Rival temples and structures would be repurposed frequently, but you do not see the type of desecration mentioned in the earlier comment. Yet you also do have records of the expulsion and genocide of 5000 Jains from the city of Madurai by the Shaivites. The targetting of Buddhist structures and the Bo Tree by Shashanka is well documented by multiple sources. The targeting & execution of the Ajivikas by the young Ashoka is also suggested by multiple sources.

At the same time, these sort of atrocities were very much the exception, not the rule in the long history of Ancient India. I can only speculate that the eclectic nature of the population at large prevented any one group from gaining the upper hand for very long, tempering the ability to target vulnerable groups. Even most dynasties had the preferred religious tradition shifting across generations.

Were not most of these statues discovered long after the Islamic conquest? If so, it doesn't sound like that would be the reason.

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