Andhra Ikṣvāku dynasty

Successors in the Krishna valley

As Sātavāhana power broke up in the early third century CE the Ikṣvākus took the eastern Deccan, claiming the name of the ancient solar lineage of Ayodhyā as a mark of legitimacy. Their capital Vijayapurī lay in a valley of the Krishna at the site now called Nāgārjunakoṇḍa, which has been excavated more thoroughly than almost any other early historic site in the peninsula.

Its inscriptions record a striking division of patronage: the kings performed Vedic sacrifices, including the horse sacrifice, while the royal women — sisters, queens and daughters of the house — endowed the Buddhist monasteries. Whether this reflects a family arrangement, a division of political constituencies, or simply the areas in which each was expected to give, the pattern is repeated across several reigns.

Nāgārjunakoṇḍa

The site held some thirty Buddhist establishments — stūpas, monasteries, apsidal shrines — along with Brahmanical temples, an amphitheatre and a palace complex. Its inscriptions name monastic schools from across India and record donations from as far as Sri Lanka, and it is one of the best sources for the internal organisation of Indian Buddhism in this period.

In the 1950s the valley was flooded by the Nagarjuna Sagar dam. Selected monuments were dismantled and rebuilt on an island and a hilltop museum, and the rest is under the reservoir — one of the largest deliberate losses of an Indian archaeological landscape.

The dynasty fell to the Pallavas in the early fourth century CE.