Udayagiri caves
Udayagiri mean the mountain of the sunrise, a historical Hindu ritual site home to twenty rock-cut caves near Vidisha, Madhya Pradesh. Vishnu Padagiri is the otherwise known name of the place meaning "the feet of Vishnu". The Udayagiri Caves are twenty rock-cut caves near Vidisha, Madhya Pradesh from the early years of the 5th century CE. They contain some of the oldest surviving Hindu temples and iconography in India. The Udayagiri Caves complex consists of twenty caves, of which one is dedicated to Jainism and all others to Hinduism. The Jain cave is notable for one of the oldest known Jaina inscriptions from 425 CE, while the Hindu Caves feature inscriptions from 401 CE.[ They are the only site that can be verifiably associated with a Gupta period monarch from its inscriptions. Udayagiri caves contain iconography of Vaishnavism (Vishnu), Shaktism (Durga and Matrikas) and Shaivism (Shiva).
They are notable for the ancient monumental relief sculpture of Vishnu in his incarnation as the man-boar Varaha, rescuing the earth symbolically represented by Bhudevi clinging to the boar's tusk as described in Hindu mythology. In addition to these, Udayagiri has a series of rock-shelters and petroglyphs, ruined buildings, inscriptions, water systems, fortifications and habitation mounds, all of which remain a subject of continuing archaeological studies.
