Amaravati

The stupa

The stupa was founded early, perhaps in the third century BCE, and was enlarged and elaborately faced with carved limestone slabs in the second and third centuries CE under the Satavahanas and their successors. It was among the largest in India, with a diameter of some fifty metres and a railing carved on both faces.

The Amaravati school is stylistically distinct from northern work: crowded, fluid compositions of slender elongated figures in complex movement, filling the surface with narrative incident.

Subjects

The slabs show Jataka scenes, episodes from the Buddha's life, and — a favourite subject — representations of the stupa itself, which is how much of its original appearance is known. Both aniconic and iconic treatments occur, sometimes on the same monument, which makes the site important evidence for the transition to the Buddha image.

Destruction and dispersal

The stupa was ruined and its stone quarried for building and lime-burning over centuries. Colin Mackenzie recorded it in the early nineteenth century, and further removals followed. The sculpture was divided: a large collection went to the British Museum in London, another to the Government Museum in Chennai, with further pieces elsewhere and a site museum at Amaravati.

Almost nothing stands at the site. Reconstructing the monument depends on the drawings made during removal, on the slabs themselves, and on the stupa's own depictions of itself.

Region

The lower Krishna valley was a major Buddhist region for centuries, with Nagarjunakonda, Jaggayyapeta, Ghantasala and other sites nearby. Amaravati was a centre of the Mahasanghika tradition, and the region has been proposed as one of the settings in which Mahayana ideas developed.