Sigiriya (Lion Rock)

Sigiriya, a near-vertical column of hardened magma rising about 200 metres above the surrounding plain in central Sri Lanka, is crowned with the ruins of a fortified palace complex built around 477–495 CE by King Kashyapa I, according to the Culavamsa, a Sri Lankan chronicle compiled centuries after the events it describes. The chronicle relates that Kashyapa seized the throne after killing his father, King Dhatusena (by, according to the account, walling him alive), and built his palace atop Sigiriya partly as a fortress against his half-brother Moggallana, the rightful heir, who had fled to India and was expected to return with an army.

The lower approaches to the summit are decorated with a gallery of frescoes depicting around 21 surviving bare-breasted female figures — out of an original total estimated at over 100 — often interpreted as celestial nymphs (apsaras) or, in some scholarly readings, as portraits of the king's consorts, painted in a style with parallels to the cave paintings of Ajanta in India. A wall beneath the frescoes, polished to a mirror-like sheen and known as the "Mirror Wall," is covered with graffiti left by visitors between roughly the 6th and 14th centuries CE, including poems of admiration for the painted women — among the oldest known examples of cursive Sinhalese script and a rare direct record of how ordinary visitors of the period reacted to the site. Kashyapa's chronicle-recorded reign ended in 495 CE when Moggallana did return with an army; according to the Culavamsa, Kashyapa's own forces deserted him mid-battle and he took his own life rather than be captured, after which the capital was moved away from Sigiriya and the site was given over to Buddhist monasteries.