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British officer John Smith discovers 29 elaborate cave
temples carved into the side of
a rocky cliff overlooking the Waghora River.
Believed to had been constructed in 200 B.C.,
the caves' architecture and artwork reveal new insights into the
origins of India's mysterious sacred past.
Ajanta is unique in the sense that these other ** of India.
Here they started the work from 200 B.C. and this work continued to VI century A.D.
As you walk into the Ajanta caves you see all kinds of temples,
carved out of solid rock, niches and alcoves, even statues...
But it's all been carved out of one giant block of rock.
Visited yearly by thousands of Buddhist worshipers,
the caves are considered sacred even to this day.
Built as holy shrines and temples by devoted monks,
they contain numerous places of worship-- Complete with
paintings and sculptures depicting the life and times of
the Supreme Buddha, often referred to as the Enlightened One.
There are many different sculpture subjects at Ajanta.
Many of the sculptures are of the Buddha.
In addition to those sculptures,
there are various depictions of other mythological beings.
These are called Jatakas.
These Jatakas show these previous lives,
and these lives could be related to, say, the Buddha being born as an animal,
being born as a deity, or being born as a human.
Even today, modern engineers are baffled
as to how the caves could have been cut from the 70-foot-high
granite cliffs more than 2,000 ago.
These caves were created through the removal of
stone, literally tunneling into the surface of the rock.
Rock was removed, it was chiseled away, taken out, and
any interior space that you see at the caves today, were created
through this removal of stone.
Any architectural details that one finds at the site, any
sculptures, they're actually carved from the same piece of
stone, which is the mountainside itself.
According to researchers, the Ajanta complex is significant because of the
deliberate positioning of the caves around the cliffs--
An arrangement that reveals an unusually advanced understanding of celestial activity.
The caves are carved into this horseshoe bend, and
are oriented in various directions.
Some are oriented towards the west, others to the south, and
some are oriented to the east so that they are oriented towards the rising sun.
It does seem to be the case that ancient peoples in India were
very much interested in the universe and the relationship of heavenly bodies.
Evidence of the cave sculptor's precise knowledge of celestial
movements can be found in two particular caves.
Each contains large stupas, or dome-shaped structures featuring
Siddhartha Gautama,
the supreme Buddha and spiritual teacher who founded Buddhism.
Cave 19 is oriented towards the winter solstice,
and what this means is that on the day of the winter solstice,
the morning sunlight would filter through this large window
on the facade and the sunlight itself would illuminate the stupa.
This is also true of Cave 26 at Ajanta.
It's oriented towards the summer solstice, and so on the day of
the summer solstice, that light would filter and strike the stupa within it.
Now, this would have been very difficult to do,
itself, because you're cutting solid rock from inside of a cave.
So you would need some pretty high-tech gear in order to
tunnel and build and chip away inside of solid rock in order to
really be perfectly oriented to the solstice.
Might the Ajanta caves had been constructed with
the aid of advanced alien technology
as ancient astronaut theorists believe?
If so, might they also had been considered sacred by the locals because of their
connection to early extraterrestrial visitors?
Many ancient astronaut theorists look at the stupa and say it's a symbolic
reference from the power of light. Many times is symbolically shown with
a young Buddha placed in there and it almost looks like he could
be manipulating some type of controls within the stupa.
The stupas were always used as a, as a way for Buddha to
ascend or descend into the heavens. And he do see stupas in this art work
very possibly saying that the Buddha was going into space.
There was an obsession of ancient human beings
to depict things that they saw.
And I think they did it with carvings on caves and
depictions and sculptures and monuments...
Because that's what they saw.
They were duplicating what they saw.
But what they depict are very strange things.
They depict gods and half animal/half god type figures.
So you have here what seems to be some kind of special
subterranean temple that's built for extraterrestrials or some
kind of space gods.
What were the Buddhist monks seeing?
Could the Buddhist monks have been helped by some kind of an
extraterrestrial presence?
The ancient astronaut theory suggests that if
we find paintings or carvings of half men half animals,
that that means that those creatures at one point really existed because
they were genetically created by extraterrestrials.
The sculptures and wall paintings at Ajanta are
some of the oldest surviving works of art from ancient India.
But was their elaborate construction really the result
of early human contact with space travelers?
If so, might there be additional evidence of stone-carved shrines
in other regions of the world?
Evidence that might provide the clues to our own origins.