The Gopika Cave, also called
Gopi ka Kubha, is one of three caves found in the Nagarjuni Hill cluster near the
Barabar Caves in Bihar. The other two are Vapiyaka Cave and Vadathika Cave, also called
Vapiya ka Kubha, and
Vadathi ka Kubha respectively. These are near the
Lomas Rishi Cave, the earliest known cave excavated in the 3rd century BCE and gifted by Ashoka to the
Ajivikas monks. The Nangarjuni Caves were excavated in 214 BCE from a granite hill by the grandson of Ashoka. The original inhabitants of these were the Ajivikas, a non-Buddhist Indian religion that later became extinct. They abandoned the caves at some point. To mark the consecration, he left inscriptions in Sanskrit. These inscriptions are in then prevalent Gupta script and these have survived. After the 14th-century, the area was occupied by Muslims, as a number of tombs are nearby. Harrington stated that Muslims were living near these caves. He speculated that these once were "religious temples" because he saw three defaced images in them. Wilkins seems to have relied essentially on the similarities with later
Brahmic scripts, such as the script of the
Pala period and early forms of
Devanagari. Wilkins also correctly identified the inscription to be related to Hinduism. Another translation was published by Kamalakanta Vidyalankar with James Prinsep in 1837. John Fleet published another revised translation in 1888. ==Description==