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Brihadisvara Temple

Thanjavur, Thanjavur District, Tamil Nadu Shaiva tradition

Served from the stored corpus. Last scan Sep 28, 2026. Next scan Oct 28, 2026.

Photograph

Stored photograph. The earliest frame in this record is 1868.

3 of 7

Photograph from 1869 by Samuel Bourne showing the Subrahmanya shrine in the Brihadisvara temple complex at Thanjavur.

Subrahmanya shrine

Samuel Bourne photographed the Subrahmanya shrine in the same complex in 1869.

  1. 1868 Temple from the grounds
  2. 1869 Gopura
  3. 1869 Subrahmanya shrine
  4. 1880s–1890s Temple, photographer not named
  5. 1890s Temple and grounds
  6. 1908 Postcard view
  7. 15 December 2010 Gopuram

1869 Samuel Bourne, 1869. Public domain, KITLV, via Wikimedia Commons. Source and license

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What changed?

Each line keeps the confidence of its source. Conflicts are not collapsed.

  • Identified from a secondary account This line records the published identification only. It does not add a construction date or a height. Date not established in this corpus · Documented fact · Medium confidence

Evidence summary

Counts are records in this corpus, including gaps.

7 Republishable photographs
0 Interior photographs
0 Diagrams
1 Documents

About the temple

The Brihadisvara Temple stands on the south bank of the Kaveri at Thanjavur. Secondary accounts attribute the great temple to the Chola ruler Rajaraja and give it the builder’s name Rajarajesvaram. Linnaeus Tripe photographed the vimana in 1858. Those prints are not stored here. The photographs stored here begin with Edmund David Lyon in 1868 and Samuel Bourne in 1869.

Primary deity: Shiva

Secondary accounts place the main temple around 1000. That date is not checked against an inscription edition in this corpus. Tripe’s 1858 photographs are known and not ingested.