{"it":{"id":"ASI-DWA","kind":"site","sub":"Asia","name":"Dwarka (offshore structures claim; Dwarkadhish Temple)","place":"India","lat":22.246,"lon":68.967,"date":"temple 200 BCE per Ministry of Tourism; settlement fifteenth century BC per Rao (INTERPRETATION)","mat":"stone","facts":[{"a":"TL date","v":"1570 BCE (single date)","u":"text","r":55}],"nfacts":5,"tags":["Asia","Temples"],"sum":"Off Dwarka on India's west coast, divers have raised three-holed stone anchors of 100 to 150 kg and carved temple parts, and the archaeologist Rao dated the earliest settlement to the fifteenth century BC from pottery.","why":"It is the meeting point of a sacred story and a seabed survey, and the submerged blocks have no direct date.","src":[447,591],"nsrc":3,"yt":"The anchor type was used from 2500 BC to modern times. How much can anchors alone date a drowned town?","rel":["ASI-RAM","LEV-ATL"],"hook":"Off Dwarka, divers raised stone anchors of 100 to 150 kg, but that anchor type was used from 2500 BC to modern times."},"S":{"55":["Wikipedia Dwarka","https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dwarka&oldid=1379208039"],"447":["Wikipedia: Dwarka","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarka"],"591":["Gaur et al., Protohistoric ceramics of Dwarka and Bet Dwarka (NIO repository; TL 3520 BP)","https://drs.nio.org/drs/handle/2264/2711"]},"rec":{"id":"ASI-DWA","alias":[],"ms":[{"f":"Dwarkadhish Temple","a":"spire height","v":"78","u":"m","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Dwarka","yr":"2026","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia Dwarka","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dwarka&oldid=1379208039","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M3594"},{"f":"original temple","a":"earliest date","v":"200 BCE","u":"text","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Dwarka","yr":"2026","m":"derived","c":"Wikipedia Dwarka","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dwarka&oldid=1379208039","b":"S","bb":"","t":"INTERPRETATION","n":"archaeological","id":"M3595"},{"f":"nearby Late Harappan site","a":"TL date","v":"1570 BCE (single date)","u":"text","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Dwarka","yr":"2026","m":"derived","c":"Wikipedia Dwarka","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dwarka&oldid=1379208039","b":"S","bb":"","t":"LAB_RESULT","n":"","id":"M3596"},{"f":"copper plate","a":"date","v":"574 CE","u":"text","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Dwarka","yr":"2026","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia Dwarka","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dwarka&oldid=1379208039","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"Simhaditya inscription","id":"M3597"},{"f":"offshore","a":"investigations","v":"ASI onshore and offshore surveys","u":"text","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Dwarka","yr":"2026","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia Dwarka","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dwarka&oldid=1379208039","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"no dimensions of offshore structures on page -> gap","id":"M3598"}],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[{"a":"key_structure_dims","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"largest_block","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"block_mass","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"stone_count","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"slope_face_angle","r":"no published face/slope angle in sources reached (often n/a for non-pyramidal sites)"},{"a":"wall_batter","r":"no published batter survey in free sources"},{"a":"orientation","r":"no published azimuth reached"},{"a":"corner_precision","r":"no published precision survey in free sources"},{"a":"levelness","r":"no published levelling survey in free sources"},{"a":"rock_type","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"geochem_petro","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"quarry_source","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"mortar","r":"dry-stone construction or no binder analysis in free sources"},{"a":"tool_marks","r":"no tool-mark study in free sources reached"},{"a":"coords_elevation","r":"no elevation row yet"},{"a":"volume_labor","r":"no volume/labour estimate in sources opened"},{"a":"construction_phases","r":"no phase sequence in sources opened"},{"a":"lab_date_material","r":"no lab date with dated material in sources opened"},{"a":"hydrology_acoustics","r":"no published hydrology/acoustic measurement in sources opened"},{"a":"magnetic_radiation","r":"no published magnetic/radiation survey found (searched site name + magnetometry/radiation; Wikipedia, Google Scholar snippets)"},{"a":"excavation_history","r":"no excavation history row yet"},{"a":"artifacts_found","r":"no finds row yet"}],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA063","a":"offshore structures","who":"see anomaly_claims","main":"temple 200 BCE earliest; Late Harappan TL 1570 BCE","ms":"","st":"unresolved","n":"offshore structure dimensions/dates not in opened source (W18)","nl":4}],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"sub":[],"site":{"age":"temple 200 BCE earliest; Late Harappan TL 1570 BCE nearby (INTERPRETATION)","dm":"historical/stylistic (INTERPRETATION)","lab":"NO","weak":"no lab date opened","unesco":"","dens":"STUB"},"co":{"lat":"22.24639","lon":"68.96667","src":"Wikidata/enwiki (Q817247)","agree":"agree","b":"S","note":"Wikidata/enwiki (Q817247) vs OSM way 91573157 (Dwarkadhish Temple; enwiki point is town) delta 0.0086 deg | W18 retry: delta 0.0086 <0.01 but enwiki point = town, OSM = Dwarkadhish Temple (different features) -> downgraded to SINGLE_SOURCE","osm":"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/91573157"},"src":[{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia Dwarka","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dwarka&oldid=1379208039"},{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia: Dwarka","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarka"},{"id":"S2592","t":"Gaur et al., Protohistoric ceramics of Dwarka and Bet Dwarka (NIO repository; TL 3520 BP)","u":"https://drs.nio.org/drs/handle/2264/2711"},{"id":"VASI-DWA-4","t":"Current Science vol. 86 no. 9, p. 1256 (PDF)","u":"https://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/86/09/1256.pdf"},{"id":null,"t":"Rao, Shikaripura Ranganatha (1987), “Marine Archaeological Explorations off Dwarka, Northwest Coast of India”, Indian Journal of Marine Sciences 16, pp 22 to 30, National Institute of Oceanography, full text via NIScPR","u":"https://nopr.niscpr.res.in/bitstream/123456789/38461/1/IJMS%2016(1)%2022-30.pdf"},{"id":null,"t":"Gaur, Sundaresh, Tripati, Gudigar, Vora and Bandodker (2001), “A group of 20 stone anchors from the waters of Dwarka, on the Gujarat Coast, India”, International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 30, pp 95 to 108, abstract only (read via the OpenAlex record of the DOI)","u":"https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1095-9270.2001.tb01359.x"},{"id":null,"t":"District Devbhumi Dwarka, Government of Gujarat, “Dwarkadhish Temple” tourist place page","u":"https://devbhumidwarka.nic.in/tourist-place/dwarkadhish-temple/"},{"id":null,"t":"Incredible India, Ministry of Tourism, Government of India, “Dwarkadhish Temple”","u":"https://www.incredibleindia.gov.in/en/gujarat/dwarka/dwarkadhish-temple"}],"sum":"Above the temple at Dwarka flies a flag cut from fifty-two yards of cloth. The district administration says it can be seen from ten kilometres away, out across the town, the creek and the open water of the Arabian Sea. Pilgrims climb fifty-six steps to the shrine beneath it. Few of them think about what lies under their feet, or under the waves that the flag looks out over. But for forty years divers have been going down off this coast in search of a city that the oldest stories of India say the ocean swallowed.\n\nDwarka sits at the north-western tip of Gujarat, on India's west coast. In Hindu tradition it is the city of the god Krishna, whose story is told in the great epic the Mahabharata. The archaeologist Shikaripura Ranganatha Rao summarised the tradition this way: Krishna founded Dwarka on the ruins of an earlier settlement called Kusasthali, on land reclaimed from the sea, and after his death the sea took the city back. Today Dwarka is a living temple town, part of the Char Dham, the four great pilgrimages of India, along with Rameswaram, Badrinath and Puri. Its main shrine, the Dwarkadhish Temple on Gomati creek, is also called Jagat Mandir, the universal shrine.\n\nEven the temple above water is hard to pin down. The district administration gives the height of its carved spire as 43 metres; India's Ministry of Tourism says 78. The district page cites the archaeology department's view that the temple is about 1,200 years old; the ministry says it was first built in 200 BCE and reached its present form in the 16th century. Two official sources disagree by thirty-five metres and more than a thousand years about a building anyone can walk into. The seabed is harder still.\n\nThe serious search began with Rao. In 1979 and 1980 he excavated beneath the temple forecourt and found three earlier temples built one after another, in the 1st century BC and the 2nd and 9th centuries AD, each destroyed, by his account, by the sea. Beneath them he found the earliest settlement, which he dated to the 15th century BC from a pottery type called Lustrous Red Ware. Then he went into the water. In six dives in April 1986, off the temple of Samudranarayana, the Sea God, which marks the old harbour mouth where the creek meets the sea, his team traced structures up to 700 metres from shore. They exposed more than a hundred building blocks, the largest 2.6 by 1.3 by 0.4 metres, longer than a tall man lying down. They raised carved temple parts, including a moonstone, beams and a corner pillar from a railing.\n\nAnd they found anchors. Three-holed stone anchors weighing 100 to 150 kilograms each, which Rao judged almost identical to Late Bronze Age anchors from Ugarit in Syria and Kition in Cyprus, Late Bronze Age ports of the eastern Mediterranean. On the nearby island of Bet Dwarka, he reported walls marking a submerged town four kilometres long and 500 to 600 metres wide, with two rock-cut slipways seven metres wide for launching boats. Finds there included a seal of Indus type, an inscribed jar, a coppersmith's stone mould and objects of iron and shell. From pottery, the seal and the inscription, Rao concluded that Dwarka and Bet Dwarka sank in the 14th century BC and that the sea had risen about five metres since. He went further. He used the iron at Bet Dwarka to place the Bharata War, the great war of the Mahabharata, in the 14th century BC, rejecting an older date of 900 to 1000 BC.\n\nThat was a bold claim: an excavated site tied to an epic battle. Rao himself admitted its weakness. No wood or charcoal old enough for radiocarbon dating was found at Bet Dwarka. His dates rested on pottery and inscriptions, and on a chain of comparisons with iron finds in Karnataka and pottery at other sites.\n\nThen the next generation of divers took a harder look. A team from India's National Institute of Oceanography, working in 1998 and 1999, found many anchors 10 to 14 metres down, some trapped between rocks, and read the spot as an anchorage. Studying a group of twenty, they found that the three-holed type Rao had compared with Ugarit was used from about 2500 BC right up to modern times. An anchor of that shape, in other words, cannot date anything on its own. They linked another kind, the grapnel anchors, to Indo-Arab trade between the 8th and 16th centuries AD, and called the dating of the Dwarka anchors a matter of concern.\n\nIn 2004, the institute's archaeologists A. S. Gaur, Sundaresh and Sila Tripati published a fuller survey. They had counted more than 120 stone anchors, the largest an estimated 668 kilograms. Three to six metres down lay semicircular structures of L-shaped blocks and scattered walls, the remains most often cited as the drowned city. Earlier surveys had read the semicircles as the bastions of a fort wall. But among the stones the team found no pottery at all, and pottery is the litter of every human settlement. They took its absence as a sign that this was not a town. They suggested instead a jetty, possibly the dock that Sayajirao Gaekwad of Baroda built along Gomati creek, which served as a safe harbour until the 19th century. The anchors, they wrote, showed a port active since the historical period and busiest in medieval times.\n\nSo the mainstream view now is careful. There is a real ancient settlement at Dwarka and on Bet Dwarka. A thermoluminescence date from pottery at a nearby Late Harappan site gives about 1570 BCE, a single date but a genuine one. There is a long history of seafaring here, and a sea that has clearly taken buildings more than once. What has not been shown is that the stones on the seabed are Krishna's city rather than a later harbour.\n\nYet the questions Rao raised have not gone away. He reported a strange gap: after the early town on Bet Dwarka drowned, he found no occupation for nearly a thousand years before new buildings rose between the 1st century BC and the 5th century AD. A living tradition, carried in sacred poetry, insists that a great city stood here and was taken by the sea. The sea has demonstrably taken buildings here, again and again. The submerged blocks have no direct date. The anchors span four and a half thousand years. The answer, if there is one, lies in the silt.\n\nThe flag still flies over the temple, raised above three older temples the sea already claimed. How far down would a diver have to go to reach the first Dwarka, and would anyone recognise it if they found it?","qs":["The most quoted date comes from Bet Dwarka, not from the underwater stones. How much can one date carry for a site it was not taken from?","Underwater walls with no pottery: a drowned city, or a harbour where boats once tied up?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/Dwarakadheesh_Temple%2C_2014.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dwarakadheesh_Temple,_2014.jpg","title":"Dwarakadheesh Temple, 2014.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Vishnupranay.k","cap":"srikrishna temple at dwrka"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/ff/At_bet_dvaraka_samudram.JPG/1280px-At_bet_dvaraka_samudram.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:At_bet_dvaraka_samudram.JPG","title":"At bet dvaraka samudram.JPG","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"T.sujatha","cap":"బెట్ ద్వారక సముద్రం"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3a/Bhixuvulu_at_rukmani_mandir_1.JPG/1280px-Bhixuvulu_at_rukmani_mandir_1.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bhixuvulu_at_rukmani_mandir_1.JPG","title":"Bhixuvulu at rukmani mandir 1.JPG","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"T.sujatha","cap":"రుక్మిణీ మందిరం సమీపంలో భిక్షువులు"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d1/Dwarka.jpg/1280px-Dwarka.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dwarka.jpg","title":"Dwarka.jpg","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"Kesu Kalan / Miskina","cap":"The Lord Krishna in the Golden City from the Harivamsha (Geneology of Vishnu). Opaque watercolor, ink and gold on paper. H: 34.9 cm; W: 23.2 cm; India. 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