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These caves are none other than the famous Ajanta and Ellora caves located near the city of Aurangabad in Maharashtra.This city is all geared for tourists who flock in from all over the world to see these famous caves. The richness of their imagery and the fact that they were carved between the 2nd century BC and the 8th century AD is highly impressive. It appears that while the rest of the world was in the dark ages, we in this country were highly evolved in thought, word, and deed. India and Indians indeed have a past to be proud about.
At Ajanta, more than 2,000 years ago artists literally carved cathedrals and monasteries out of solid rock. There are sculptures and miraculously preserved frescoes that immortalise a 2,000-year-old civilization by displaying its daily life as well as the epic stories of its religion. Around the 7th century AD, Ajanta was abandoned by its creators for some unknown reason, and they moved to Ellora (30 kilometres from Aurangabad). At about this time Buddhism was on the wane in India. The cave temples that were found in the hills of Ellora over the next six centuries feature Buddhist as well as Hindu and Jain mythology. All of Ellora's cave-temples are awesome in size and detail; the most breathtaking of them is the Kailasa Temple, the world's largest monolithic structure, sculptured as intricately as if it were an ivory miniature.
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