Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Bharhut stupa is an ancient Buddhist monument in Bharhut village, Satna district, Madhya Pradesh, central India. It is notable for stone railings and a gateway densely carved with narrative reliefs, and is one of the earliest surviving examples of Indian Buddhist art.
The railings at Bharhut are dated to circa 125-100 BCE, and the eastern gateway to 100-75 BCE. The stupa itself may have been first built by the Maurya king Ashoka in the 3rd century BCE, though the decorative stonework was added later.
King Dhanabhuti was the major donor of the Bharhut stupa. An epigraph on a pillar of the gateway records that he caused the gateway to be made and presented the stone-work during the rule of the Sugas.
Most of the Bharhut sculptures and railings were dismantled and reassembled at the Indian Museum in Kolkata. Two panels are held at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington. The ruined stupa foundations remain at the original site in Madhya Pradesh.
The SS Indus, which was transporting Bharhut sculptures from Calcutta toward London for an exhibition, ran aground in 1885 near the town of Mullaitivu in northeastern Sri Lanka. The wreck was lost for more than a hundred years and was not rediscovered until 2014.
The Bharhut Jataka reliefs depict previous lives of the Buddha, including the Mahakapi Jataka, in which the Buddha as a monkey king offers his body as a bridge to save his fellow monkeys, and the Nigrodha Miga Jataka, in which the Bodhisattva as a golden deer saves a pregnant doe from slaughter. Eighty-two inscriptions label the Jataka panels directly in Brahmi script.