Rajaraja Chola completes the Brihadisvara temple at Thanjavur
- Date
- 1003–1010 CE
- Category
- Culture, arts & philosophy
- Region
- South India (Tamil Nadu)
- Era
- Post-Classical / Medieval
- Significance
Between about 1003 and 1010 the Chola emperor Rajaraja I built the great Brihadisvara (Rajarajeswaram) temple at Thanjavur, dedicated to Shiva, as the imperial state temple of the expanding Chola state.
Its granite vimana rises more than sixty metres, among the tallest temple towers in India, and the whole complex stands as the supreme achievement of Chola Dravidian architecture. Beyond its scale, the temple was an economic and administrative institution: its inscriptions record vast endowments of land, gold, livestock and hundreds of attendants, dancers and musicians, documenting the wealth that flowed from Chola agriculture and Indian Ocean trade. The temple embodied the sacral kingship of Rajaraja, whose conquests across south India and Sri Lanka made the Cholas the paramount power of the peninsula. Together with the later Gangaikondacholisvaram and Airavatesvara temples it forms the UNESCO-listed Great Living Chola Temples.
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Empires active in 1003–1010 CE
- Abbasid Caliphate750 CE – 1258 CE
- Byzantine Empire330 CE – 1453 CE
- Song Dynasty960 CE – 1279 CE
- Kanem-Bornu Empire700 CE – 1900 CE
- Liao Dynasty (Khitan Empire)916 CE – 1125 CE
- Ghana Empire700 CE – 1240 CE
Related culture, arts & philosophy events
- Murasaki Shikibu completes The Tale of Genjic. 1008–1021 CE
- Ferdowsi completes the Shahnameh, the Persian Book of Kings8 March 1010 CE
- Zhu Xi completes the Neo-Confucian synthesis and the Four Booksc. 1175-1190
- House of Wisdom and the Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement under al-Ma'munc. 830 CE
- The rise of the European university (Bologna and Paris)c. 1088 (University of Bologna)
- Al-Ghazali completes The Incoherence of the Philosophersc. 1095 CE
Further reading
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