Mauryan Timeline

600 BCE – 1200 CE · 6 sites

All sites in this period

Kailasa Temple (Cave 16) at Ellora, carved from a single basalt outcrop, Maharashtra, India

Country Record

Longest Recorded History in India

Ellora Caves

100 BCE – 1100 CE

The world's largest rock-cut monastic and temple complex — 34 monasteries and shrines carved directly into a 2-kilometre basalt escarpment in Maharashtra, representing Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain traditions side by side. The Hindu Kailasa Temple (Cave 16), hewn from a single enormous rock in the 8th century CE, is the largest monolithic structure ever carved from stone and one of humanity's most audacious feats of rock-cut architecture.

ClassicalLate AntiqueEarly Medieval

Rock-cut Buddhist cave monasteries at Ajanta, cut into a horseshoe-shaped gorge, Maharashtra, India

Country Record

Oldest Complex in India

Ajanta Caves

200 BCE – 480 CE

The greatest gallery of Buddhist art in the ancient world — 30 rock-cut caves carved into a horseshoe-shaped gorge in Maharashtra, containing murals and sculptures produced from the 2nd century BCE to the 6th century CE. The Gupta-period paintings (4th–5th century CE) in Caves 1, 2, 16, and 17 are among the finest figurative paintings to survive from antiquity anywhere in the world, comparable to the frescoes of Pompeii and the mosaics of Byzantine Ravenna.

ClassicalLate Antique

New

Lumbini

600 BCE – 630 CE

The birthplace of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, and one of the most sacred pilgrimage sites in the Buddhist world — a Nepalese sanctuary anchored by an inscribed stone pillar erected in 249 BCE by the Mauryan emperor Ashoka, one of the earliest and most reliable epigraphic confirmations of any event in the Buddha's life. Excavations beneath the Maya Devi Temple uncovered a timber shrine radiocarbon dated to the 6th century BCE — the earliest known Buddhist structure anywhere and remarkably consistent with the traditional dating of the Buddha's birth.

Iron AgeClassicalHellenistic

Excavated ruins of the Nalanda Mahavihara monastic university complex, Bihar, India

Country Record

Earliest Known Site in India

Nalanda

427 CE – 1200 CE

The ancient world's greatest university — a walled monastic complex in Bihar, India, that functioned as an international center of Buddhist learning from the 5th to 12th centuries CE, housing up to 10,000 students and monks from China, Korea, Tibet, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia before its destruction in 1193.

ClassicalEarly MedievalMedieval

The Great Stupa of Sanchi, the oldest stone structure in Buddhist architecture

World Record

Known by the Most Names in History

Sanchi

269 BCE – 1200 CE

A hilltop complex in Madhya Pradesh containing the oldest stone structure in Buddhist architecture — the Great Stupa commissioned by Emperor Ashoka in the 3rd century BCE — whose four carved gateways (toranas) rank among the greatest achievements of ancient Indian sculpture.

Iron AgeClassicalHellenistic

Ruins of Sirkap, the Hellenistic-era city of Taxila, with grid-plan streets visible

Country Record

Longest Continuously Occupied Site in Pakistan

Taxila

518 BCE – 600 CE

An ancient city in the Pothohar Plateau of Pakistan where Achaemenid Persia, Alexander's Macedonia, and Mauryan India met — its three successive city sites and Buddhist monasteries document 1,200 years of continuous urban life at the crossroads of the ancient world.

Iron AgeClassicalHellenistic