3rd century BCE to 4th century CE Buddhist monastery and artwork, Phanigiri Telangana India - 31

Phanigiri is a small, remote village about 40 kilometers north-northwest of Suryapet (NH
365B) and 80 kilometers south-southwest of Warangal, Telangana. Near one of the tributaries of the Krishna-Godavari river delta network, the region is largely plain farmlands punctuated by rocky hillocks between 100 to 300 feet high. Phanigiri site is on northern top of one such large double hillock, about 150–200 feet high. The village is to the south side and some of the Phanigiri discoveries have been moved and are stored in a village panchayat owned house.

Phanigiri site was discovered and excavated between 1980s and 2000s. One of the comprehensive reports on it was published in 2008 by Peter Skilling, New discoveries from South India: The life of the Buddha at Phanigiri, Andhra Pradesh, Arts Asiatiques, Volume 63, pp. 96-118.
The Phanigiri site is a Buddhist monastic site. There are no Hindu nor Jain monuments on this hillock, nor is there any evidence of appropriation, within 1000 feet of the site.
Farther away, about 2000 feet from the hillock with the Buddhist site, on the southern side of another hillock are abandoned and desecrated small Jain and Hindu temples.
The Phanigiri Buddhist site excavations revealed a vihara and a stupa.
Several inscribed pillars, walls and statues have been found at Phanigiri. These are all related to Buddhism and are in Brahmi script. Some are in Sanskrit and some in Prakrit. The translations suggest that the site was active between 3rd century BCE to at least 4th-century CE. The site may have closed down about the 5th-century or much later (c. 12th-century), based on the scant evidence of its demise.
Many artworks were found here, and this is one of the few Buddhist sites where the life of Buddha was depicted in panels. The notability of the Phanigiri site is that the legends as shown in the Phanigiri panels do not match those in north Indian version of Buddha life as found in Buddhacarita, nor do they roughly parallel the version found in Pali version of Jatakanidana. The inspiration and basis of Phanigiri version must have been another text, either lost or yet to be discovered. Phanigiri site confirms that there were many distinct variants of Buddha life in circulation prior to the 4th-century CE, and possibly that Phanigiri belonged to another competing monastic school of Buddhism.
According to Peter Skilling, Phanigiri is one of the sites along with many other discoveries in India in the second half of the 20th-century which suggest that the history of Buddhism as published between 1950s and 1970s is "very much out of date" (Skilling, p. 96).
One of the Brahmi inscriptions on an octagonal pillar helps date the site to have existed during the reign of Hindu king Rudrapurusadatta of the Iksvaku dynasty, since it records that he made a large gift to the Phanigiri Buddhist monastery. The inscription is notable because the first 80% of it is in Sanskrit, while the remaining 20% is in Prakrit.
At the site, coins of Satavahana, Mahatalavara and Iksvaku dynasties have also been found. The scale of these findings indirectly suggest, in combination with the different inscriptions, that this Buddhist monastery must have been prominent in this region at least between the 1st century BCE and 3rd-century CE.
Another excavation discovery of an inscription in 2003 here suggests that the monastery received a gift and renovations support from Vishnukundins in the 4th and 5th-century CE. This suggests that the Phanigiri site was active till at least the middle of the 1st millennium.
The site has not been completely excavated. It is an ASI protected and managed site.
Many of the statues, marble artworks and inscribed pillars excavated here are stored in a village house. Some have been moved to other museums such as those in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.