Place · Rashtrakuta capital · India
Manyakheta
The Rashtrakuta capital at Manyakheta (modern Malkhed) in Kalaburagi district, Karnataka, from 814 to 968 CE under the kings Amoghavarsha I (815-878) and his successors. The Arab traveller and merchant Suleiman al-Mahri visiting in 851 CE described Manyakheta as one of the four great empires of the world (with the Caliphate, the Byzantine, and the Tang). The city was deliberately laid out as the Rashtrakuta imperial capital after the shift from Ellora-adjacent Nasik. Amoghavarsha's Kavirajamarga (c.850), the earliest known Kannada literary work, was composed here under his patronage. The 969 Chalukya reconquest ended the Rashtrakuta imperial moment. Almost nothing of the city survives; the Jain Neminatha Basadi is the chief remaining structure.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Patron dynasty
- Rashtrakuta
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 17.180, 77.000
Connections (2)
- PatronageEllorā
Mānyakheta was the Rashtrakuta capital from about 818, and Kailasa at Ellora is the dynasty's greatest commission, begun under Krishna I in the eighth century. The Arab geographers ranked the Rashtrakutas among the four great empires of the world, alongside the Abbasids, the Byzantines and the Tang — a judgement based on what their merchants saw at these ports and this capital.
- Traditional seat ofEllorā
Mānyakheta is now Malkhed, a small town in Kalaburagi district with almost nothing above ground of the capital that ruled the Deccan for two centuries. Its greatest surviving commission is two hundred and fifty kilometres away at Ellora. That gap between a vanished capital and a durable monument is the ordinary condition of Deccan dynastic history, and it is why the temples carry the record that the cities do not.
On these journeys
Sources
History of India — Wikipedia
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