Sigiriya

Before the palace

The rock was used long before it became a royal seat. Shelters in the boulders around its base carry short inscriptions in early Brahmi, recording caves given to Buddhist monks, which places a monastic presence there from about the third century BCE. That monastic use is the background to the rock's later history, and to one modern argument about what the palace really was.

Kashyapa and the chronicle's story

The account of the palace comes from the Culavamsa, written by monks several centuries later. It tells how Kashyapa, son of King Dhatusena by a consort of lesser rank, seized the throne at Anuradhapura, had his father killed, and, fearing his half-brother Moggallana, the rightful heir who had fled to India, moved his court to the rock and fortified it. The chronicle dates his reign to about 477–495 CE, though other reckonings shift it by a few years. When Moggallana returned with an army raised in south India, Kashyapa came down to fight on the plain, and the chronicle says that when his army broke he took his own life on the field. Moggallana restored the capital to Anuradhapura, and the rock was handed back to the monks.

The chronicle is a monastic text with a clear moral line, and its picture of Kashyapa as a parricide in hiding should be read with that in mind. The broad outline, a short reign and a capital on the rock abandoned soon after, fits the archaeology.

The site

The summit, about two hectares, holds the foundations of a palace, cisterns cut into the rock, and terraces. The approach climbed through a gateway on a shelf of the north face, of which two enormous paws carved in brick and plaster survive. They are what is left of a lion through whose body the stair once passed, and they give the rock its name, from Sihagiri, Lion Rock.

Halfway up the west face, in a sheltered pocket of rock, are the paintings: about twenty half-length female figures, richly jewelled, carrying flowers, shown rising from clouds. Only a fraction survive of what was once a much larger painted surface. Who they represent is not settled: celestial apsaras, ladies of the court, and goddesses have all been proposed. In style they belong with the painting of the Gupta and Vakataka world on the mainland, the closest comparison being Ajanta.

Below them runs the Mirror Wall, a gallery wall coated with plaster polished to a shine. Visitors from about the sixth century onward scratched verses into it, most of them in Sinhala, many addressed to the painted women. Senarath Paranavitana read and published more than six hundred of these graffiti, and they are among the most important early sources for the Sinhala language and its poetry.

At the foot of the rock lie gardens laid out on a strict axis: pools, causeways, and channels fed by underground conduits, some of which still carry water in the rainy season. They are among the oldest surviving landscaped gardens in Asia, and with the boulder gardens and terraces on the slopes they make the rock a single planned design rather than a fortress alone.

Interpretation and debate

H. C. P. Bell began excavating in the 1890s, and the Central Cultural Fund, set up with UNESCO support, worked here from 1982. Paranavitana argued that Kashyapa modelled his palace on Alakamanda, the mountain city of the god Kubera, and so presented himself as a god-king. Others have questioned whether the rock was ever primarily a palace, suggesting that its buildings and paintings belong to a monastery and that the chronicle's story has been read into the remains. The majority view still follows the chronicle, but the question remains open.