Bhattiprolu

Revenue division per the OFFICIAL Bapatla district site: Bapatla. Bapatla district now has 20 mandals. CONFLICT ON REVENUE DIVISIONS: the Wikipedia Bapatla district page describes THREE divisions (Bapatla 6 mandals, Chirala 5, Repalle 9), while the official district site (last updated 6 Aug 2026) shows only TWO (Bapatla 12, Chirala 8) and treats Repalle as an assembly constituency rather than a revenue division. ALSO NOTE: the official site's prose still says 'Bapatla District Consists of 25 Mandals' while its own table lists only 20 - the prose is stale, left over from before the Addanki area (Addanki, Ballikurava, J. Panguluru, Korisapadu, Santhamaguluru) moved to Prakasam district effective 1 Jan 2026. Mandal listed by cited source. The source does not explicitly name the mandal headquarters settlement; AP mandals are conventionally named after their HQ village but this was not independently confirmed, so the HQ is not asserted here. ORIGIN: part of the pre-2022 undivided Guntur district. | ALSO: MERCHANT-GUILD SITE. Bhattiprolu is a village and mandal headquarters in Bapatla district, site of an ancient Buddhist maha stupa dated to the 3rd century BCE or earlier, excavated by Alexander Rea in 1892. The inscribed relic caskets record donations by urban guilds (gothi) and merchant associations (nigama), i.e. documented organised merchant bodies in the lower Krishna valley in the 3rd-1st centuries BCE. This is the earliest documented trading-guild evidence in the Krishna-Guntur belt and is the deep background to the region's later Komati/Vaisya merchant presence. The inscriptions are also the earliest datable Brahmi in South India (the 'Bhattiprolu script').