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The Jantar Mantar, Jaipur
Site number:
1338
Type of site: Cultural
Date: 18 century
Date of Inscription: 2010
Location: Asia, India, Jaipur
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Description: The Jantar Mantar is India’s most significant, comprehensive, best preserved observatory. Built in the early 18th century, it represents the astronomical skills and cosmological concepts of the end of the Mughal period, which was ruled over by a scholarly prince. Designed to observe astronomical positions using the naked eye, the 20 main monumental fixed instruments demonstrate architectural and instrumental innovations. --WHMNet paraphrase from the description at WHC Site, where additional information is available.
  Albi (Occitan: Albi) is a commune in southern France. It is the prefecture of the Tarn department. It is l The Jantar Mantar is a collection of architectural astronomical instruments, built by Maharaja (King) Jai Singh II at his then new capital of Jaipur between 1727 and 1734. It is modeled after the one that he had built for him at the Mughal capital of Delhi. He had constructed a total of five such facilities at different locations, including the ones at Delhi and Jaipur. The Jaipur observatory is the largest and best preserved of these. It has been inscribed on the World Heritage List as "an expression of the astronomical skills and cosmological concepts of the court of a scholarly prince at the end of the Mughal period". The observatory consists of fourteen major geometric devices for measuring time, predicting eclipses, tracking stars' location as the earth orbits around the sun, ascertaining the declinations of planets, and determining the celestial altitudes and related ephemerides. Each is a fixed and 'focused' tool. The Samrat Yantra, the largest instrument, is 90 feet (27 m) high, its shadow carefully plotted to tell the time of day. Its face is angled at 27 degrees, the latitude of Jaipur. The Hindu chhatri (small cupola) on top is used as a platform for announcing eclipses and the arrival of monsoons. Built from local stone and marble, each instrument carries an astronomical scale, generally marked on the marble inner lining. Bronze tablets, all extraordinarily accurate, were also employed. Thoroughly restored in 1901, the Jantar Mantar was declared a national monument in 1948. An excursion through Jai Singh's Jantar is a unique experience of walking through solid geometry and encountering a collective astronomical system designed to probe the heavens. --Wikipedia. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
Source: http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1338
Reference: 1. UNESCO World Heritage Center (http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1338). 2. Wikipedia.
 
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