Place · Chalukya temple town · India
Aihole
Also known as Aihole inscription, Meguti
The Chalukya temple-town at Aihole in Bagalkot district, Karnataka, where the Early Chalukya kings experimented across the 6th-8th centuries with apsidal, flat-roofed, Nagara and Dravida temple forms — some 125 temples standing within a few hundred metres of one another. The Durga temple (c.700 CE) is apsidal, the Lad Khan temple (c.450 CE) is flat-roofed and square-plan, the Meguti Jain temple (634 CE) carries the Pulakeshin II inscription — the Aihole prashasti by poet Ravikirti. Aihole functioned as the architectural laboratory where the Nagara-Dravida distinction was first worked out through side-by-side building, before the mature Chalukya temples at Pattadakal.
- Function
- Archaeology & heritage
- Patron dynasty
- Chalukya
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 16.019, 75.881
Worth knowing
The Meguti temple inscription of 634, composed by Ravikīrti, dates Pulakeshin II and name-drops Kālidāsa and Bhāravi — a keystone of Indian chronology.
Connections (3)
- Architectural modelDeogarh Dashavatara temple
Deogarh's Dashavatara temple, with one of the earliest surviving shikharas, is among the inputs the Chalukyas were working from at Aihole a century or so later — where apsidal, flat-roofed, northern and southern forms stand within a few hundred metres of each other in what is plainly a century of deliberate experiment. A hundred and twenty temples in one village is not a town's requirement; it is a school.
- Script continuity withHalmidi
The Halmidi inscription of about 450 CE is the earliest known writing in Kannada, the point at which a regional language enters the epigraphic record on its own account rather than as a few words inside a Sanskrit text. Sanskrit eulogy continues alongside it at Aihole and everywhere else for centuries; what changes is that the vernacular is now also a language fit to be cut in stone.
- PrecursorPattadakal
Aihole, on the tentative list since 2004, is where the Chalukyas tried out every temple plan they could think of; Pattadakal, inscribed in 1987, is where they built the successful ones side by side in the northern and southern manners. The experiment is ten kilometres from the result, and only the result is inscribed.
On these journeys
Sources
Aihole — ASI; Chalukya inscriptions
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