iron pillar of Delhi
— — iron that the centuries refuse to rust.
Not only on a wall.
“A seven-metre column of wrought iron standing in the Qutb complex south of Delhi, raised by a Gupta king in the fourth or fifth century and almost untouched by rust in sixteen hundred years. Its surface is the work of slow chemistry: a thin phosphorus film the monsoons cannot break.
iron pillar of Delhi, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The pillar stands in the courtyard of the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque inside the Qutb complex at Mehrauli, in south Delhi. The complex, which also holds the Qutb Minar and the tomb of Iltutmish, was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993. The pillar is widely believed to have been moved to its current location in the late twelfth century, when Qutb-ud-din Aibak built the mosque on the ruins of earlier Hindu and Jain temples. Its original site is debated; the strongest argument places it at Udayagiri in Madhya Pradesh.
The pillar is wrought iron, 7.21 metres tall above ground with another 1.12 metres buried below, and weighs roughly 6,500 kilograms. It was forge-welded from successive lumps of bloomery iron rather than cast. The metal carries about one percent phosphorus, far higher than modern structural iron, and Delhi's climate has allowed a thin film of crystalline iron hydrogen phosphate to form across the surface. That passive layer is what has held off serious corrosion for more than sixteen hundred years and made the pillar a standing puzzle for metallurgists.
A six-line Sanskrit inscription in Brahmi script on the pillar credits its raising to a king named Chandra, generally identified with the Gupta emperor Chandragupta II, who reigned from about 375 to 415 CE. The inscription dedicates the pillar as a standard of Vishnu and records a victory over the Vahlikas in the Sindhu region. A garuda figure is thought to have once stood at the top. The pillar predates Islamic Delhi by nearly seven centuries and was already an antique when the Qutb mosque rose around it.