Ajanta Caves
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- The major Robert Gill spent almost twenty years copying the murals, but all but four of his 27 large copies burned in the Crystal Palace fire in London in 1866.
- A second campaign led by John Griffiths produced some 300 painted copies over thirteen years, and more than a hundred of them were lost in another London fire in 1885.
- Caves 1, 2, 16 and 17 together hold the largest body of ancient Indian wall painting to survive anywhere.
- The caves are hewn from layered basalt of the Deccan Traps, lava flows laid down by volcanic eruptions at the end of the Cretaceous period.
- Carvers began each cave with a narrow tunnel at ceiling level and then worked down and outward, a method still visible in the unfinished caves.
- Cave 1, probably commissioned by Harishena himself, seems never to have been consecrated: its shrine Buddha bears no soot from butter lamps.
- The blue used to paint foreign figures is lapis lazuli, a pigment that had to be imported from what is now Afghanistan or Iran.
- The donor of Cave 26 hoped it would endure as long as the sun and moon, and filled it with sculpture, including a great reclining Buddha.
- John Smith's 1819 graffiti sits well above head height today because he scratched it while standing on a pile of rubble about five feet high.
- The cave numbers follow their position along the cliff, not their age, and caves found later were given letters, such as 15A.
Why it is worth it
The Buddhist monks who carved these thirty caves into a horseshoe-shaped gorge weren't just after dramatic scenery — the site served as a monsoon retreat, a place where monks, pilgrims and travelling merchants sheltered during the rains, when travel across the region became difficult. The complex has two distinct building phases separated by centuries, the earlier one going back to around the 2nd century BCE; it fell quiet for a long stretch before being revived.
The dramatic later phase of carving accelerated under Harishena, the last major ruler of the Vakataka dynasty, whose patronage funded a second wave of caves between roughly 460 and 480 CE. When he died, the wealthy sponsors who had been funding individual caves lost interest almost immediately, construction simply stopped mid-project, and — combined with a shifting political landscape — the monks were eventually squeezed out entirely. The jungle did the rest, swallowing the site for well over a thousand years.
In 1819, British army officer John Smith was on a tiger hunt in the area when a local shepherd boy pointed him toward the gorge; he spotted a sliver of carved stone through the undergrowth and had stumbled onto what is now known as Cave 10. He left his own mark on the site — a piece of graffiti scratched into one of the ancient frescoes reading "John Smith, 28th Cavalry, 28th April, 1819," still visible today, an unintentional second layer of history carved directly onto the first.
Getting there
10 km from Soygaon. Aurangabad Airport (IXU) is about 83 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Ajanta Caves are 30 rock-cut Buddhist cave monuments dating from the second century BCE to about 480 CE in Aurangabad district of Maharashtra state in India. Ajanta Caves are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Universally regarded as masterpieces of Buddhist religious art, the caves include paintings and rock-cut sculptures, described as among the finest surviving examples of ancient Indian art, particularly expressive paintings that present emotions through gesture, pose and form.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
20.55342, 75.70047per Wikidata