Sigiriya

Sigiriya, the Lion Rock, is a granite column about 180 metres high rising from the plains near Dambulla in the Central Province of Sri Lanka, with the ruins of a fifth-century palace on its summit and a planned city of gardens, moats and pools around its base. Sri Lanka's medieval chronicle, the Culavamsa, credits it to King Kashyapa I, who reigned from 477 to 495 CE. Its painted women, its polished "mirror wall" covered in early poetry and its water gardens make it among the best-preserved instances of ancient town planning in South Asia.

People lived in the area long before any palace was built. The Aligala rock shelter, just east of the rock, shows occupation around 3000 BCE, in the Mesolithic period. Inscriptions in Brahmi script on the western side show that Buddhist monks and ascetics were using the many rock shelters around Sigiriya by the first or second century BCE. The shelters were cut under large boulders, with drip ledges carved to keep rain from their mouths.

The Culavamsa tells a dramatic story. In 477 Kashyapa, whose mother was a non-royal consort of King Dhatusena, seized power with the help of the army commander Migara and killed his father by walling him up alive. The rightful heir, his half-brother Moggallana, fled to South India, swearing revenge. Expecting his return, Kashyapa moved his residence from the old royal city of Anuradhapura to the summit of Sigiriya, which he turned into a fortified city. In 495 Moggallana came back with an army; according to the chronicle, Kashyapa's troops misread a turn of his war elephant as a retreat and deserted him, and he took his own life on the battlefield.

That account is not the only one. Other traditions make Dhatusena the main builder and Kashyapa the son who completed the work, or picture Sigiriya as a pleasure palace; versions of Kashyapa's death include poisoning by a concubine. Some scholars argue that the site was a Buddhist complex with no military role, perhaps tied to rivalry between the Mahayana and Theravada traditions of Buddhism on the island.

The complex had an upper palace on the flat summit with rock-cut cisterns, a mid-level terrace with the Lion Gate, where the carved paws of a great lion still flank the stairway though its head has collapsed, and lower palaces on the slopes. On the west lay symmetrical water gardens fed by underground channels, some of which still work in the rainy season, beside boulder gardens and terraces that follow the natural ground. Paintings once covered much of the rock's western face, an area roughly 140 metres long and 40 metres high, and a few groups of women survive; whether they depict royal ladies or women at religious observance is unresolved, and their style has been compared with the Ajanta Caves in India.

After his victory Moggallana returned the capital to Anuradhapura, then the seat of the Anuradhapura Kingdom, and Sigiriya became a Buddhist monastery, which lasted until the thirteenth or fourteenth century. Visitors kept coming to look at the paintings. From about the eighth century onwards they scratched verses into the glossy plaster of the mirror wall, most of them in the ninth and tenth centuries; the archaeologist Senarath Paranavithana deciphered 685, many addressed to the painted women. These form the only surviving body of poetry from the Anuradhapura period. After the monastery ended, the rock drops out of the record until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the Kingdom of Kandy used it briefly as an outpost.

In 1831 Major Jonathan Forbes, an officer of the 78th Highlanders, riding back from Polonnaruwa, came upon the overgrown rock. Small-scale archaeological work began in the 1890s, and H. C. P. Bell was the first to study it in depth. On 14 October 1967 vandals splashed paint over the frescoes, and restoration, assisted by Luciano Maranzi, a conservator trained in Rome, lasted until April 1968. The government's Cultural Triangle Project turned to Sigiriya in 1982, excavating the whole city for the first time, and UNESCO inscribed the Ancient City of Sigiriya as a World Heritage Site the same year. A 2010 report warned that the colours of the surviving frescoes had been fading since 1930, and writing on the mirror wall is now banned to protect the old verses.