Sigiriya, the rock citadel of King Kashyapa I

The story is told in the Culavamsa, the continuation of the Mahavamsa. Kashyapa, the son of King Dhatusena by a non-royal consort, seized power with the help of the army commander Migara, imprisoned his father and had him killed — according to the chronicle, walled up alive; by another story, in the bund of the Kala Wewa, the great reservoir Dhatusena had built — while the rightful heir, his half-brother Moggallana, fled to India. Fearing his return, Kashyapa left Anuradhapura for the rock of Sihagiri, cleared the land around it, enclosed it with a wall and built a staircase in the form of a lion. Excavations have revealed a carefully planned royal city: a palace with rock-cut cisterns on the summit, the Lion Gate on a terrace halfway up — only its great paws survive — moats and ramparts, and symmetrical water gardens whose pools and conduits partly still work. Paintings of women bearing flowers once covered much of the western face of the rock; a small number survive, and they are often compared with those of Ajanta. The polished Mirror Wall beneath them is covered with verses left by visitors from the 8th century onwards, mostly in the 9th and 10th; Senarath Paranavithana deciphered 685 of them.

According to the Culavamsa, Moggallana came back in the eighteenth year of Kashyapa’s reign — with his death in 495 this points to 477–495, the dating given by UNESCO, although some works date the reign 473–495. Moggallana returned from India with twelve companions and raised an army on the island; in the battle on the plain near Sigiriya Kashyapa’s troops, mistaking a turn of his war elephant for a retreat, abandoned him, and he took his own life. Moggallana moved the capital back to Anuradhapura, and Sigiriya became a Buddhist monastery, which lasted until about the 13th or 14th century. Other versions make Dhatusena the first builder, and some interpretations see the site as chiefly a Buddhist complex without a military role. Sigiriya has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1982.