The Maitraka Capital and Its Monasteries

Valabhi began as a provincial seat under the Guptas and became an independent capital when the Maitraka general Bhatarka took power in the late fifth century, ruling Saurashtra and much of Gujarat until an invasion ended the line in the eighth. Its copper plate grants, of which a large number survive, are among the better documented land records of early medieval India and show the court endowing Buddhist monasteries, Brahmanical temples and Jain establishments within the same reigns.

Chinese pilgrims describe a Buddhist university there. Xuanzang in the seventh century reports hundreds of monasteries and thousands of resident monks of the Sammitiya school, and Yijing, writing later, names Valabhi and Nalanda together as the two places a student in India would go for advanced study. The court itself was for the most part Shaiva. The city fell in the eighth century, in an attack usually attributed to Arab forces operating out of Sind, and was not reoccupied. What survives is a brick mound beside the small town of Vala, excavated only in part, with the copper plates and the pilgrims' accounts carrying almost everything that is known about it. The copper plates are also the reason the city can be dated at all. Each grant opens with a genealogy of the ruling house and a date in the Valabhi era, and setting them in sequence produces a king list and a chronology for the dynasty that no chronicle supplies, which is why a mound with almost nothing standing has a better documented political history than many towns that are still inhabited.