Kailasa Temple, Ellora

Ellora, Aurangabad District, Maharashtra Shaiva rock-cut temple; Ellora Cave 16

Served from the stored corpus. Last scan Sep 29, 2026. Next scan Oct 29, 2026.

Photograph

Stored photograph. The earliest frame in this record is 1880s.

2 of 2

Photograph from 1888 by Lala Deen Dayal showing the Kailasa Temple at Ellora.

Deen Dayal view, 1888

Lala Deen Dayal photographed the Kailasa Temple in 1888.

Previous Next

1888 Lala Deen Dayal, 1888. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Source and license

View photograph

What changed?

Each line keeps the confidence of its source. Conflicts are not collapsed.

Rock-cut temple recorded by colonial and Indian photographers Commercial and survey photographs of the excavated temple circulate from about 1870 onward. This record stores 1880s frames available as republishable Commons JPEGs. 1880s photographic record stored · Documented fact · Medium confidence

Evidence summary

Counts are records in this corpus, including gaps.

2 Republishable photographs

0 Interior photographs

0 Diagrams

1 Documents

About the temple

The Kailasa Temple (Cave 16) at Ellora is a monolithic rock-cut Shiva temple cut downward from the basalt cliff. Secondary accounts associate the main excavation with the Rashtrakuta ruler Krishna I in the eighth century. Albumen photographs of the excavated temple circulated by about 1870; Lala Deen Dayal photographed it again in the 1880s. The earliest photograph stored here is an unnamed albumen view catalogued to the 1880s, with Deen Dayal’s 1888 frame as a second source. KITLV holds a circa-1870 print that was not ingested because of file size.

Primary deity: Shiva as Kailasanatha

Secondary accounts place the principal Rashtrakuta excavation in the eighth century. That date is not checked against an inscription edition here. The stored photographs begin in the 1880s; a circa-1870 KITLV print is known and not ingested.