Place · Buddhist stupa site · India
Bhattiprolu
The 2nd-century BCE Buddhist stupa at Bhattiprolu in Guntur district, Andhra Pradesh, excavated by Alexander Rea in 1892 — yielding inscribed relic caskets with Brahmi variants of distinct form. The Bhattiprolu Brahmi has been argued by some epigraphists (Georg Bühler, more recently T.V.G. Sastri) as representing an early southern script line separate from the standard Mauryan Brahmi, with letter forms that may have influenced the development of Dravidian scripts. The casket inscriptions name eight donors (including a king Kuberaka) and describe the relics of the Buddha. The relics are now in the Government Museum, Chennai. The script debate remains unresolved.
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 16.100, 80.780
Connections (2)
- Script continuity withSānchī
The Bhattiprolu relic caskets in the Krishna delta carry an early Brahmi variant with letter forms that differ from the Ashokan standard, sometimes argued to be a separate southern script line. Sanchi's inscriptions are in the Mauryan norm. Both are donor and relic records on Buddhist deposits, at opposite ends of the Mauryan world, and the divergence between them is part of the evidence that Brahmi was not simply issued from the centre.
- Companion in the same setGhantasala
Ghantasala belongs to the same early Buddhist landscape as Bhattiprolu, whose stupa and relic deposits provide another important window into the development of Buddhism in ancient coastal Andhra
Sources
Bhattiprolu inscriptions
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