fatehpur sikri
Basing his arguments on the excavations by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) in 1999-2000 at the Chabeli Tila, senior Agra journalist Bhanu Pratap Singh said the antique pieces, statues, and structures all point to a lost "culture and religious site," more than 1,000 years ago. "The excavations yielded a rich crop of Jain statues, hundreds of them, including the foundation stone of a temple with the date. The statues were a thousand years old of Bhagwan Adi Nath, Bhagwan Rishabh Nath, Bhagwan Mahavir and Jain Yakshinis," said Swarup Chandra Jain, senior leader of the Jain community. Historian Sugam Anand states that there is proof of habitation, temples and commercial centres before Akbar established it as his capital. He states that the open space on a ridge was used by Akbar to build his capital.
But preceding Akbar's appropriation of the site for his capital city, his predecessors Babur and Humayun did much to redesign Fatehpur Sikri's urban layout. Attilio Petruccioli, a scholar of Islamic architecture and Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Polytechnic University of Bari, Italy, notes that "Babur and his successors" wanted "to get away from the noise and confusion of Agra [and] build an uninterrupted sequence of gardens on the free left bank of the Yamuna, linked both by boat and by land." Petruccioli adds that when such escapist landscapes are envisioned, the monument becomes the organizing element of the city at large, partly due to its orientation at a significant location and partly due to its sheer size. Humayun's Tomb was one such organizing element, which at a height of 150 feet towered over the city and is now one of the most recognizable Mughal monuments in the country.
The place was much loved by Babur, who called it Shukri ("Thanks"), after its large lake that was used by Mughal armies. Annette Beveridge in her translation of Baburnama noted that Babur points "Sikri" to read "Shukri". Per his memoirs, Babur constructed a garden here called the "Garden of Victory" after defeating Rana Sangha at its outskirts. Gulbadan Begum's Humayun-Nama describes that in the garden he built an octagonal pavilion which he used for relaxation and writing. In the center of the nearby lake, he built a large platform. A baoli exists at the base of a rock scarp about a kilometer from the Hiran Minar. This was probably the original site of a well-known epigraph commemorating his victory.