For roughly a thousand years, the painted caves of Ajanta sat forgotten, overtaken by the jungle growing across the horseshoe-shaped cliff that contains them, their entrances hidden from the surrounding countryside and unknown even to most people living nearby. Buddhist monastic use of the site had ended by around the seventh century CE, and without a resident community to maintain them, the caves and the paintings inside them simply disappeared from general memory.
Their return to wider knowledge came about by accident. On April 28, 1819, a hunting party of British officers from the Madras Presidency, tracking a tiger through the forest above the Waghora River, stumbled onto what turned out to be the arched facade of one of the caves, cut into the cliff and partially concealed by vegetation. Captain John Smith, a member of the party, is recorded as having climbed up to investigate, and, in a gesture that reads very differently now than it likely did to him at the time, carved his own name and the date directly into a sculpture inside the cave he entered, a mark still visible on the stone today, an inadvertent record of the exact moment a major site of ancient Buddhist art re-entered the historical record.
What Smith and his companions had found was not one cave but thirty, spanning roughly seven centuries of construction and containing, among carved sculpture, wall paintings substantially older and more extensive than anything comparable then known to have survived in India, a discovery whose full scholarly and artistic significance only became clear over the decades of study that followed.