Kasyapa, the master builder

Sigiriya comes dramatically, if tragically, into the political history of Sri Lanka in the last quarter of the fifth century during the reign of King Dhatusena I (459-477 A.D.), who ruled from the ancient capital at Anuradhapura. A palace coup by Prince Kasyapa, the king’s son by a non-royal consort, and Migara, the king’s nephew and army commander, led ultimate to the seizure of the throne and the subsequent execution of Dhatusena, Kasyapa, much reviled for his patricide, established a new capital at Sigiriya, while the crown prince, his half-brother Moggallana, went into exile in India, Kasyapa I (477-495 A.D.) and his master-builders gave the site its present name, ‘ Sinha-giri’ or ‘ Lion- Mountain’, and were responsible for most of the structures and the complex plan that we see today. This brief Kasyapan phase was the golden age of Sigiriya.

The post-kasyapan phase when Sigiriya was turned back into a Buddhist monastery, seem to have lasted until the thirteenth or fourteenth century. Sigiriya then disappears for a time from the history of Sri Lanka until, in the sixteenth and centuries, it appears again as a distant outpost and military center of the kingdom of Kandy. In the mid-nineteenth century antiquarians begin to take an interest in the site, followed some decades later by archaeologists, who have now been working there for nearly 100 years, since the 1890s.

The Cultural Triangle project began its work at Sigiriya in 1982 and has focused attention not only on the best-known and most striking aspects of Sigiriya: the royal complex of rock, palace, gardens and fortifications of the ‘western precinct’, but also on the entire city and its rural hinterland.