I've spent a long time being quietly obsessed with the stone sculptures of the Kathmandu valley, the ones standing in the open at a crossroads, half-buried beside a temple, worn smooth by people touching them for fifteen hundred years. Most of them have no label. Many have no published description at all. If you want to know what the goddess buried to her waist behind the Ganesa temple at Chabahil actually is, there is no page to look at.

So I started building one. Shilakosh (शिलाकोश, "stone treasury") is a catalogue of Nepalese stone sculpture. A dictionary, essentially, but for sculptures.

shilakosh.neocities.org

Where it stands right now: 92 entries, 45 3D models, 12 places, spanning the 1st century CE to the 18th.

I have no idea on coding, and this was all built on a boring saturday using claude code. So, what I have here is a solution I think very less people will be interested on.

How an entry gets made:

The sources. The backbone is Lain S. Bangdel's The Early Sculptures of Nepal (1982) and his Inventory of Stone Sculptures of the Kathmandu Valley (1995). I also used individually published articles.

Publishing. The site is deliberately primitive: a single index.html that never changes and a content file, entries.js, that holds everything. Maps are Leaflet over OpenStreetMap tiles, with numbered locality pins keyed to a list, in the style of the maps in Bangdel's own books. Free hosting, no ads, no tracking, no account required.

The mesh side, and where the compromises are

The models are photogrammetry-derived, then remeshed and decimated hard. Raw captures come out in the 1–3 million triangle range; the published models sit at roughly 5k–10k triangles, exported as GLB with Draco compression, landing around 300–400 KB each.

That is a brutal triangle budget for weathered stone, and I know exactly what it costs. At 10k tris, quadric edge-collapse decimation keeps the silhouette and the broad forms and throws away precisely what makes these objects interesting: chisel marks, erosion pitting, the difference between a worn surface and a re-cut one. The models are also untextured, shape only, no colour, which I actually prefer for honesty's sake, but it means all surface information is carried by geometry that mostly isn't there any more.

Free hosting gives me 1 GB. That's fine for text and fine for 5k-triangle 3D blobs. It is not fine for a real archive. The host offers me only 20GB of bandwidth per month, which is okay if there's little traffic.

And there are around 1,500 sculptures still uncatalogued. Roughly 100 are of the 1st to 5th centuries, the period the catalogue focuses on. The rest run through to the 19th.

At my current rate the text is achievable. The 3D isn't, not at a quality worth keeping.

What would actually help

• Photographs. If you've been to any of these places, photographs from all four sides are worth more to this project than money. The site says which views are missing for every sculpture. Please send photos of any sculptures that you visit at shilakosh360@gmail.com, I'll be glad to give respective courtesy to whomever helps with the project.
• Corrections. If a date, a place name or an attribution is wrong, tell me which line.
• Anyone who does photogrammetry or heritage 3D professionally, I'd like to be told what I'm doing wrong. I mostly used free version of meshy for the quick 3D models and I am unable to make 3D for chaturmurti and multi direction faced sculptures.
• Support, if you can. There's a small contribution link on the site. It mostly goes to storage and bandwidth.

Happy to answer anything, about the sculptures, the sources and the process of making it. I must reiterate the fact that this entire thing was made in a single day. There are mistakes bound to appear. It is my personal ode to our beloved polymath L S Bangdel. Thank you and happy reading everyone!

I've spent a long time being quietly obsessed with the stone sculptures of the Kathmandu valley, the ones standing in the open at a crossroads, half-buried beside a temple, worn smooth by people touching them for fifteen hundred years. Most of them have no label. Many have no published description at all. If you want to know what the goddess buried to her waist behind the Ganesa temple at Chabahil actually is, there is no page to look at.

So I started building one. Shilakosh (शिलाकोश, "stone treasury") is a catalogue of Nepalese stone sculpture. A dictionary, essentially, but for sculptures.

shilakosh.neocities.org

Where it stands right now: 92 entries, 45 3D models, 12 places, spanning the 1st century CE to the 18th.

I have no idea on coding, and this was all built on a boring saturday using claude code. So, what I have here is a solution I think very less people will be interested on.

How an entry gets made:

The sources. The backbone is Lain S. Bangdel's The Early Sculptures of Nepal (1982) and his Inventory of Stone Sculptures of the Kathmandu Valley (1995). I also used individually published articles.

Publishing. The site is deliberately primitive: a single index.html that never changes and a content file, entries.js, that holds everything. Maps are Leaflet over OpenStreetMap tiles, with numbered locality pins keyed to a list, in the style of the maps in Bangdel's own books. Free hosting, no ads, no tracking, no account required.

The mesh side, and where the compromises are

The models are photogrammetry-derived, then remeshed and decimated hard. Raw captures come out in the 1–3 million triangle range; the published models sit at roughly 5k–10k triangles, exported as GLB with Draco compression, landing around 300–400 KB each.

That is a brutal triangle budget for weathered stone, and I know exactly what it costs. At 10k tris, quadric edge-collapse decimation keeps the silhouette and the broad forms and throws away precisely what makes these objects interesting: chisel marks, erosion pitting, the difference between a worn surface and a re-cut one. The models are also untextured, shape only, no colour, which I actually prefer for honesty's sake, but it means all surface information is carried by geometry that mostly isn't there any more.

Free hosting gives me 1 GB. That's fine for text and fine for 5k-triangle 3D blobs. It is not fine for a real archive. The host offers me only 20GB of bandwidth per month, which is okay if there's little traffic.

And there are around 1,500 sculptures still uncatalogued. Roughly 100 are of the 1st to 5th centuries, the period the catalogue focuses on. The rest run through to the 19th.

At my current rate the text is achievable. The 3D isn't, not at a quality worth keeping.

What would actually help

• Photographs. If you've been to any of these places, photographs from all four sides are worth more to this project than money. The site says which views are missing for every sculpture. Please send photos of any sculptures that you visit at shilakosh360@gmail.com, I'll be glad to give respective courtesy to whomever helps with the project.
• Corrections. If a date, a place name or an attribution is wrong, tell me which line.
• Anyone who does photogrammetry or heritage 3D professionally, I'd like to be told what I'm doing wrong. I mostly used free version of meshy for the quick 3D models and I am unable to make 3D for chaturmurti and multi direction faced sculptures.
• Support, if you can. There's a small contribution link on the site. It mostly goes to storage and bandwidth.

Happy to answer anything, about the sculptures, the sources and the process of making it. I must reiterate the fact that this entire thing was made in a single day. There are mistakes bound to appear. It is my personal ode to our beloved polymath L S Bangdel. Thank you and happy reading everyone!

My ECFMG certificate expires this december of 2026 and I intend to apply for the 2027 cycle. My OET however has already expired. Can I submit my application through ERAS for the match and only retake my OET exams much later before december? If yes, how early should I renew my ECFMG certificate? Thanks.