Bṛhatphalāyana dynasty

The Kondamudi plates

The dynasty is attested by the Kondamudi copper-plate grant of Jayavarman, issued from Kūdūra in his tenth regnal year and recording the gift of a village to a group of brahmins. The plates give the king's gotra as Bṛhatphalāyana, from which the dynastic name is taken — a naming convention that is itself informative, since a gotra-based dynastic label points to a family that had recently acquired royal status.

The grant belongs to the period between the fall of the Ikṣvākus and the establishment of the Pallavas and Śālaṅkāyanas in the same region, and it is nearly the whole of the evidence for the family.

The document is of interest beyond the dynasty. It is one of the earliest Indian copper-plate charters, the form of record that would carry most of the land-grant history of the following thousand years, and it shows the practice already fully developed in the Andhra country in the third century CE.