The Great Stupa at Amaravati Was Faced in Carved Limestone Under the Satavahanas, Quarried for Building Stone in the 1790s, Drawn Slab by Slab by Colin Mackenzie's Team in 1816 and 1817, and Dug Out by Walter Elliot From 1845 Before 121 Sculptures Reached the British Museum

The Great Stupa at Amaravati, on the Krishna river in Andhra Pradesh, was a mound of brick faced with carved limestone slabs, and very little of it is where it was built. James Burgess, who surveyed the site for the Madras Government in 1881 and 1882, found a pit about 75 yards across with the slabs laid out round its edge. They had been moved in turn by a local ruler’s workmen, a surveyor, a district collector, a Commissioner at Guntur and, in 1880, a Governor’s order. They are now in Chennai, in London and in a small museum beside the site.

The sources name who moved what, though not always when. This article follows Burgess’s 1887 volume, which reprints Colin Mackenzie’s own papers, and names other writers where their dates differ. For what a stupa is, see tuput’s piece on Sanchi and the stupa.

A dome faced in carved limestone

Burgess could not measure the central pile, because the clearance of 1880 had destroyed any chance of it. He worked from Mackenzie’s notes and the slabs. His estimate was a base about 138 feet across, a stupa 80 to 100 feet high including the capital on top, and a double stone rail round it, the outer one about 18 feet high. The inscriptions call the monument the Mahachaitya, the Great Chaitya, and say it belonged to the Chaitika school of monks.

On dates, Burgess read an inscription in Mauryan-period letters naming a General Mudakutala and concluded that the first monument went up around 200 BC. He dated a second inscription, naming the Satavahana king Pulumavi Vasishthiputra at the west gate, to about AD 135 to 163. The same king appears at Nasik, Karle and the Sanchi gateway, Burgess notes, and tuput’s piece on the Karla caves covers the donors named there. Robert Knox, in the British Museum’s catalogue, places the stupa’s final form at about AD 130, according to Robert Brown’s 1998 review, and Brown adds that building more or less stopped when Satavahana rule ended at the close of the third century. The Capital Region Development Authority’s history of Amaravati says the sculpture reached its height under the Satavahanas, and dates the last known reference to the stupa to 1344, an inscription in Sri Lanka about a monk repairing an image house at Dhanyakataka, the old name of the place.

Brown describes the reliefs as slabs stacked in rows against the body of the stupa, and museum catalogues call the slabs from the stupa’s cylindrical base drum slabs. The British Museum holds one, registration number 1880,0709.79, that was carved on both sides at different times. The earlier face, dated to the first century BC, shows worshippers at an empty throne under the bodhi tree, with the Buddha’s footprints at its base. The later face, which the museum dates to the third century AD, shows the stupa itself, with an image of the Buddha at its entrance. Gandhara and Mathura covers the northern schools where the Buddha first appeared in human form.

A zamindar’s town and the Hill of Lights

Before 1796 the site looked like a low mound topped by a smaller one, about 30 yards across and 20 feet high, cased in brick and known locally as Dipaldinne, the Hill of Lights. Burgess says the modern town of Amaravati, half a mile east of the old fortified city of Dharanikota, was built at the end of the 18th century by Raja Vasireddy Venkatadri Nayudu, the zamindar (a revenue-collecting landholder) of Chintapalle, who made it his capital.

In an account written around 1819 or 1820, extracts of which Burgess reprints, Mackenzie says the Raja began digging mounds in the area for bricks to build his new town. Settlers at the south end, digging for the same purpose, turned up very large bricks and some carved fragments. The Raja came to look, concluded the mound might hold treasure, told the settlers to move and ordered his workmen to dig. According to Mackenzie, the sculpted slabs from the northern side were taken to the tank of Sivaganga and used for a flight of twenty steps. Others went into the great temple of Amareswara as steps to its sanctuary and into the walls of two other temples. In his words the stones were used “in various buildings, both public and private.”

In the centre the diggers found a stone casket holding a crystal box with a small pearl and some gold leaves, which Burgess says Walter Elliot later recovered and sent to the Madras Museum. The Raja then began to turn the hole into a water tank. Mackenzie wrote that a Pindari raid in March 1816 interrupted the work and that the Raja died in August of that year. Of the digging he wrote that “scarcely a single stone has escaped uninjured.”

Mackenzie’s visits and his draughtsmen

Mackenzie, of the Madras Engineers, heard of the discoveries while on survey duty in 1797 and went to see them. Burgess, the British Library’s record of Mackenzie’s album and the Capital Region Development Authority all give 1797. A British Library record for one drawing, a sheet of three sculptures excavated during his visit, and a 2021 DT Next report give 1798.

In his first account Mackenzie describes a circular trench about ten feet wide and twelve deep cut into brickwork, with white slabs standing against its outer side. Burgess says Mackenzie took a number of slabs to Masulipatnam, from where seven went to the Asiatic Society of Bengal’s museum in Calcutta. Four others went to Madras and finally, Burgess writes, apparently to the India Office in London. He adds that at least sixteen more reached London before or with those Elliot later sent, and says there is no definite information on whether Mackenzie removed them.

Mackenzie came back in March 1816 and stayed about five months. His draughtsmen stayed until October 1817, and the British Library says fair copying went on until 1820. Burgess counts nine European draughtsmen at one time or another, plus three Indians, and the British Library’s catalogue lists Pyari Lal and Shaikh Abdullah among the artists of the album.

The album, WD1061, runs to 85 sheets. The Library describes it as the earliest record of the excavations, and says 23 of the sculptures drawn in it are now in the British Museum. A separate watercolour plan, dated June 1817 and inscribed “Laid down from actual Measurements,” marks in yellow the stones entirely destroyed and in white the places of stones that had been removed. Burgess says only the India Office copy of the drawings survived, and that of the 14 plates in James Fergusson’s 1868 book Tree and Serpent Worship taken from them, the original sculptures had “almost all perished.”

Robertson’s market and a Governor’s order

Burgess names the next removal as that of F. W. Robertson, Collector of Masulipatam, who in 1830 brought slabs down and set 33 large ones in the square of a new market that carried his name. Sir Frederick Adam, the Governor of Madras, saw them on tour in 1835 and ordered them sent to Madras for the museum of the Literary Society. Burgess says the order waited more than twenty years, and that some of the best slabs ended up in the Master Attendant’s garden until the Government recovered them in 1880.

Jennifer Howes of the British Library gives different dates. She writes that Robertson was Assistant Collector at Masulipatam from 1817 to 1819 and that the market monument was probably finished around 1819. She says it drew little notice until Adam’s visit in 1830, when he ordered it taken apart, and that the stones went to Madras in 1854. Burgess has them reaching Madras in 1856, as 39 pieces by the Reverend W. Taylor’s count. In her 2026 article Howes says 51 sculptures were taken from Amaravati in the 1816 to 1817 excavation and that most ended up in the market monument.

Elliot digs near the west gate

Walter Elliot, Commissioner at Guntur, read Mackenzie’s paper in Asiatic Researches and visited the site in 1845. Burgess writes that every fragment of stone above ground had gone. Elliot dug without a plan near the west gate, and the first object he found was one of the lions that had stood beside the entrance. The slabs he dug up were sent to Madras. They lay on the green in front of the East India Company’s college there, exposed to the weather, until the Court of Directors asked about them in 1853 and they were moved into the entry of the Central Museum.

The Reverend W. Taylor reported on them in 1856. Burgess calls his readings of the inscriptions nonsensical and says the report is useful only as a list of the stones and their sizes.

The slabs were then ordered to England. Howes gives the year of shipment as 1859 and Ruchika Sharma, writing in Scroll, as 1860. Sharma says Elliot shipped 121 pieces, and that they became known as the Elliot Marbles. Burgess uses the same phrase. The British Museum’s records for both slabs it describes online say they were transferred from the India Museum. The record for one carved footprint panel, 1880,0709.57, says it was excavated by Walter Elliot, while the record for the drum slab 1880,0709.79 lists Colin Mackenzie as a previous owner. Howes writes in 2026 that the museum received 121 Amaravati sculptures in 1880, nearly two thirds from the group moved around 1850 and the rest from the 1817 set.

Burgess says the London slabs were later arranged along the walls of the British Museum’s grand staircase.

Sewell, Burgess and the clearing of 1880

Robert Sewell of the Madras Civil Service got a grant in 1876 and began digging in May 1877. In February 1880 the Duke of Buckingham, Governor of Madras, directed the Collector to complete the excavation of the whole site at once. Burgess calls this unfortunate. No engineer was provided, the slabs were left to labourers, and the area was cleared of earth and of any trace of the stupa above its foundations. The Capital Region Development Authority says more than 400 pieces went to the Madras Museum.

Burgess took charge of the Archaeological Survey of Madras at the end of 1881. He counted 255 slabs and fragments, some of them Sewell’s, and found about ninety more. He had over 170 packed for Madras, but their removal was delayed for nearly two years. In Madras the curator of the Central Museum, without telling the Survey, had many fixed into partitions of Portland cement, and Burgess wrote that they could not be freed.

R. Subrahmanyam and K. Krishnamurthy cleared the site again in 1958, according to the Capital Region Development Authority, and recovered railing fragments with donors’ inscriptions. They also located features of the stupa and its ayakas, the projections on each face that carried five tall pillars.

Where the slabs are now

The Government Museum in Chennai, established in 1851, has an Amaravati gallery. Madras Musings lists in it a damaged lion dated to about AD 150, casing slabs and round medallions with Jataka scenes, the stories of the Buddha’s earlier births. C. Sivaramamurti’s catalogue of the collection appeared in 1942. In 2021 the Commissioner of Museums, M. S. Shanmugham, called the panels the finest example of Indian classical art from two millennia ago.

The British Museum shows its Amaravati sculptures in the Asahi Shimbun Gallery, according to Howes. At Amaravati, the Ministry of Tourism says the Mahachaitya is a protected site under the Archaeological Survey of India, with a museum next to it. Brown’s review says some material remains at that museum, and the Capital Region Development Authority says later finds by Alexander Rea and Burgess are kept in the sculpture shed there. The Ministry of Tourism adds that a 125-foot Dhyana Buddha statue has been put up at Amaravati as part of efforts to bring the site into India’s Buddhist Circuit.