If you’ve spent too much time on YouTube or know someone who’s very “talented” at transmitting misinformation on WhatsApp, you may have come across photos of a strange carving of a person riding a bicycle in an ancient Indian temple. According to various posts, this engraving shows that people in ancient India rode bicycles more than a thousand years before bicycles were invented.
You may wonder what exactly is here and what kind of bicycle is featured in the historical carvings. What we can say with almost certainty is that there were no bicycles around when this temple was first built.
Well then, what is this bicycle engraving doing there? Indian Temples Research & Media Services, in a comment about these claims on Instagram, said: “The first question that comes to my mind is; “If the bicycle was really invented during the Chola period, why wasn’t it used for nearly a thousand years?” he asks and continues: “Why do we not find a single reference to the bicycle in any literature, epigraphic evidence, statues or epics? How come the bicycle suddenly appears in another part of the world after thousands of years?”
Ophthalmologist and amateur researcher Dr. This carving, which also attracted the attention of R. Kalaikovan, probably has a very simple explanation. Dr. “While looking around, I came across a carving of a bicycle on a pillar behind the Amman temple,” Kalaikovan said in a conversation with The Hindu. It was very funny and intriguing to see a picture of a bicycle in an ancient temple. “But neither the authorities nor the scientist who wrote its history could explain how it got there, so I started to investigate this fact,” he said.
During this research, Kalaikovan discovered that the temple was renovated in the 1920s, when bicycles were a new innovation in the region. And it seems certain that this engraving was also placed at that time. Kalaikovan concludes: “Perhaps the sculptor saw someone riding a bicycle, was impressed by him and recorded him in stone forever.”
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