The Archive Carved in Stone
The Brihadeeswara temple at Thanjavur records, in a single inscription from the eleventh century, the names of 400 dancing women, their salaries, their land allotments, and the oil quota for each lamp in the sanctum. This is not hagiography. It is a payroll. The Chola kings who commissioned these inscriptions understood that a temple's spiritual authority rested partly on its administrative exactness, and so they carved the accounts into the walls where neither fire nor flood nor a dishonest treasurer could erase them.
