The painted caves of Ajanta

Ajanta's thirty or so caves are cut into a horseshoe of cliff above the Waghora river. The first group, including Caves 9 and 10 with the site's earliest paintings, dates from the second and first centuries BCE. After a long gap a second campaign added most of the caves and nearly all the paintings that survive, with inscriptions naming a minister and a feudatory of the Vakataka king Harishena.

Walter Spink argued that this second phase was compressed into a few decades, about 460 to 480 CE, and stopped abruptly when Vakataka power collapsed; that is the range shown. Others spread it into the sixth century. The Vakatakas were allied to the Guptas by marriage but were not their subjects, which is why the Gupta outline on the map leaves Ajanta out. They came to European notice in 1819, when a British cavalry officer, John Smith, came upon them while hunting.