RANMASU UYANA · 8.3372°N 80.3897°E
Sakwala Chakraya
The stone behind the name.
THE STONE
In the ruins of Ranmasu Uyana — the royal Goldfish Park of Anuradhapura, forty acres of garden between the Tissa Wewa reservoir and the Isurumuniya rock temple — a chart is cut into a granite face at eye level. It is about six feet across: seven concentric rings inside a square, quartered by cross lines, flanked by strips of carved symbols — ringed circles, quartered circles, parasols, a square with a wavy line, forms read as creatures of the sea.
Four stone seats are carved into the ledge facing it. Whatever the chart was for, it was made to be sat before and studied. Nothing like it exists anywhere else on the island, and no inscription explains it.
THE READINGS
In 1911, H.C.P. Bell, the first Archaeological Commissioner of Ceylon, surveyed the carving and read it as a cosmographical chart — a map of the worlds as ancient Buddhist texts describe them, possibly among the oldest maps of the universe in existence. In that cosmology a sakwala is one complete world-system: its own sun, its own moon, all of its own stars. The chakraya is its wheel.
Others have read a star chart. The internet reads a stargate; archaeology calls that reading absurd. The stone keeps its silence — even the dating is argued, and the park around it grew for over a thousand years. This studio keeps the conventional date, around the seventh century.
- C. 7TH CENTURY
- Cut into granite at eye level, four seats facing it.
- 1911
- Surveyed by H.C.P. Bell for the Archaeological Survey of Ceylon.
- 2026
- Redrawn as SVG path data — the mark of this studio.
THE SECOND CARVING
This studio needed a name. Coined names were tried and discarded — words that meant nothing when read. The name had to be one felt natively and read fresh by everyone else. Sakwala is that word: a complete world-system, in the language this studio thinks in.
The mark was not designed; it was excavated. The square frame of the original, the cross kept as negative space, seven rings for the seven letters of the name, Vega gold at the heart — and Lyra, the working agent, riding the middle ring. Every project here is a named body in orbit around the same center. The system grows. The geometry holds.
One mark, carved twice. Once in stone. Once in code.