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Dimbulagala Temple
Dimbulagala also known as Gunner's Quoin or Gunner's Rock during the British colonial period, is a rock formation in the Polonnaruwa District of Sri Lanka. By the time anthropologist Charles Gabriel Seligman visited the location in 1911, a cave within the rock had become a refuge of the indigenous Vedda people. During the 12th century AD, The Sinhalese people had constructed a Buddhist monastery within the rock formation. The Dimbulagala Raja Maha Vihara monastery was restored in the 1950s. The villagers around the rock are of mixed Vedda and Sinhalese ancestry. See also *Dimbulagala Raja Maha Vihara Dimbulagala Raja Maha Vihara is situated 16 kilometres south east of the ancient city of Polonnaruwa, Sri Lanka. The Dimbulagala range houses a number of caves cut into the rock with Brahmi inscriptions over their drip ledges. This forest hermita ... References * *{{cite book, last=Samarasinghe, first=S. W. R. de A., title= The Vanishing aborigines : Sri Lanka's Veddas in trans ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka (, ; si, ශ්රී ලංකා, Śrī Laṅkā, translit-std=ISO (); ta, இலங்கை, Ilaṅkai, translit-std=ISO ()), formerly known as Ceylon and officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, is an island country in South Asia. It lies in the Indian Ocean, southwest of the Bay of Bengal, and southeast of the Arabian Sea; it is separated from the Indian subcontinent by the Gulf of Mannar and the Palk Strait. Sri Lanka shares a maritime border with India and Maldives. Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte is its legislative capital, and Colombo is its largest city and financial centre. Sri Lanka has a population of around 22 million (2020) and is a multinational state, home to diverse cultures, languages, and ethnicities. The Sinhalese are the majority of the nation's population. The Tamils, who are a large minority group, have also played an influential role in the island's history. Other long established groups include the Moors, the Burghers ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
British Ceylon
British Ceylon ( si, බ්රිතාන්ය ලංකාව, Britānya Laṃkāva; ta, பிரித்தானிய இலங்கை, Biritthāṉiya Ilaṅkai) was the British Crown colony of present-day Sri Lanka between 1796 and 4 February 1948. Initially, the area it covered did not include the Kingdom of Kandy, which was a protectorate, but from 1817 to 1948 the British possessions included the whole island of Ceylon, now the nation of Sri Lanka. History Background Before the beginning of the Dutch governance, the island of Ceylon was divided between the Portuguese Empire and the Kingdom of Kandy, who were in the midst of a war for control of the island as a whole. The island attracted the attention of the newly formed Dutch Republic when they were invited by the Sinhalese King to fight the Portuguese. Dutch rule over much of the island was soon imposed. In the late 18th century the Dutch, weakened by their wars against Great Britain, were co ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Polonnaruwa District
Polonnaruwa District ( si, පොළොන්නරුව දිස්ත්රික්කය; ta, பொலன்னறுவை மாவட்டம்) is one of the 25 districts of Sri Lanka, the second level administrative division of the country. It is also one of the two districts of North Central Province and has an area of 3,293 km2. The district is administered by a District Secretariat headed by a District Secretary (previously known as a Government Agent) appointed by the central government of Sri Lanka. The capital of the district is the city of Polonnaruwa. Administrative Units Demographics Ethnicity The majority of the population are Sinhalese with a minority Sri Lankan Moor and Sri Lankan Tamil population. Religion According to the 2011 censusDepartment of Census and StatisticThe Census of Population and Housing of Sri Lanka-2011/ref> 89.7% of the population were Buddhists, 7.5% Muslim, 1.7% Hindu and 1% Christian. Politics and government ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Charles Gabriel Seligman
Charles Gabriel Seligman FRS FRAI (24 December 1873 – 19 September 1940) was a British physician and ethnologist. His main ethnographic work described the culture of the Vedda people of Sri Lanka and the Shilluk people of the Sudan. He was a professor at London School of Economics and was highly influential as the teacher of such notable anthropologists as Bronisław Malinowski, E. E. Evans-Pritchard and Meyer Fortes all of whose work overshadowed his own. Seligman's work promoted scientific racism and he was a proponent of the Hamitic hypothesis, according to which, some civilizations of Africa were thought to have been founded by Caucasoid Hamitic peoples. Since the 1960s the Hamitic hypothesis, along with other theories of "race science", has become entirely discredited in science. Life Seligman was born into a middle class Jewish family in London, the son of wine merchant Hermann Seligmann (Charles shortened his name to Seligman after 1914). He studied medicine at St Th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vedda People
The Vedda ( si, වැද්දා , ta, வேடர் (''Vēḍar'')), or Wanniyalaeto, are a minority indigenous group of people in Sri Lanka who, among other sub-communities such as Coast Veddas, Anuradhapura Veddas and Bintenne Veddas, are accorded indigenous status. The Vedda minority in Sri Lanka may become completely assimilated. Most speak Sinhala instead of their indigenous languages, which are nearing extinction. It has been hypothesized that the Vedda were probably the earliest inhabitants of Sri Lanka and have lived on the island since before the arrival of other ethnic groups in India. The Ratnapura District, which is part of the Sabaragamuwa Province, is known to have been inhabited by the Veddas in the distant past. This has been shown by scholars like Nandadeva Wijesekera. The very name ''Sabaragamuwa'' is believed to have meant the village of the ''Sabaras'' or "forest barbarians". Place-names such as ''Vedda-gala'' (Vedda Rock), ''Vedda-ela'' (Vedda Cana ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dimbulagala Raja Maha Vihara
Dimbulagala Raja Maha Vihara is situated 16 kilometres south east of the ancient city of Polonnaruwa, Sri Lanka. The Dimbulagala range houses a number of caves cut into the rock with Brahmi inscriptions over their drip ledges. This forest hermitage of medieval times and holy abode since time immemorial, home to some of the most valued fragments of early frescoes was called the ''Gunners Quoin'' by the British. This Buddhist monastery which was abandoned after the times of the Kingdom of Polonnaruwa was restored to the present status in the 1950s due to the efforts of Kithalagama Sri Seelalankara Thera, who was the chief incumbent of the Vihara until his death in 1995. Pulligoda Passing the Dimbulagala temple, the only landmark being a water tank at which point you turn to the left and continue on an unsealed road which passes the delightful ''Hitcha Pitcha weva'' (weva is a reservoir), another turn off which is almost at the foot of a rocky outcrop. A short climb up and through ju ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Landforms Of Polonnaruwa District
A landform is a natural or anthropogenic land feature on the solid surface of the Earth or other planetary body. Landforms together make up a given terrain, and their arrangement in the landscape is known as topography. Landforms include hills, mountains, canyons, and valleys, as well as shoreline features such as bays, peninsulas, and seas, including submerged features such as mid-ocean ridges, volcanoes, and the great ocean basins. Physical characteristics Landforms are categorized by characteristic physical attributes such as elevation, slope, orientation, stratification, rock exposure and soil type. Gross physical features or landforms include intuitive elements such as berms, mounds, hills, ridges, cliffs, valleys, rivers, peninsulas, volcanoes, and numerous other structural and size-scaled (e.g. ponds vs. lakes, hills vs. mountains) elements including various kinds of inland and oceanic waterbodies and sub-surface features. Mountains, hills, plateaux, and plains are t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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