Uttar Pradesh Quiz: Architecture and Monuments of Uttar Pradesh

Work on the tomb began in 1632, a year after Mumtaz Mahal's death, on the right bank of the Yamuna at Agra, in white marble brought from Makrana in Rajasthan; tradition names Ustad Ahmad Lahauri as its chief architect, and the site was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List…

Akbar's conquest of Gujarat gave the empire its western ports, and the gateway raised at Fatehpur Sikri in 1576 to mark it is one of the tallest in India, its height increased by the long flight of steps it stands on.

A severe famine struck Awadh, and the Nawab set thousands to work on the Bara Imambara in 1784 so that wages reached the hungry, with the story that nobles worked at night to pull down part of the day's building and keep the work going.

Akbar's abandoned capital was inscribed in 1986, and the other two World Heritage properties of the state are the Taj Mahal and the Agra Fort, both inscribed in 1983.

He rebuilt the old fort of Agra in red sandstone between 1565 and 1573, and his successors added to it: the Jahangiri Mahal belongs to his own reign, while Shah Jahan raised the white marble Moti Masjid and the pavilions of the Khas Mahal and the Musamman Burj, where he…

Ghiyas Beg, a Persian noble who rose to be Jahangir's treasurer with the title Itmad-ud-Daulah, was buried in a garden tomb across the Yamuna that Nur Jahan completed in the 1620s. It is the first Mughal building faced entirely in white marble and decorated with pietra dura inlay, techniques later…

The polished sandstone capital of four addorsed lions, with its abacus of four animals and wheels and the Dharmachakra below, stood on the Ashokan pillar at Sarnath near Varanasi, where the Buddha preached his first sermon; the capital was adopted as the State Emblem of India, and the wheel from…

The Buddha died, or attained Mahaparinirvana, at Kushinagar in the land of the Mallas, and the site keeps the Mahaparinirvana temple with its long reclining image of the Buddha and the Ramabhar stupa raised over the place of his cremation.

Jaunpur was the capital of the Sharqi sultans in the fifteenth century, and their architects worked out a style of their own, marked by huge pylon-like gateways in front of the prayer hall instead of slender minarets; the Atala Masjid and the Jama Masjid of Jaunpur are its best examples…

The Dashavatara temple at Deogarh, on the Betwa in Lalitpur district, is one of the earliest stone temples with a surviving shikhara, and its panels of Vishnu lying on Shesha, of Nara and Narayana and of Gajendra-moksha are standard illustrations of Gupta sculpture.

Harisena, a court poet and officer of Samudragupta, composed the eulogy engraved on the Ashokan pillar now standing in the Allahabad fort at Prayagraj; it lists the kings uprooted in the north, those of the south who were defeated and reinstated, and the frontier rulers who submitted, and it is…