Materials on which the inscriptions were recorded.
The inscriptions of India are extremely numerous, and are found, on
stone and other substances, in a great variety of circumstances. They
were mostly recorded by incision. But we have a few, referable to the
2nd or 3rd century B.C., which were written with ink on earthenware, and
some others, of later times, recorded by paint,--one on a rock, the
others on the walls of Buddhist cave-temples. Those, however, were
exceptional methods; and equally so was the process of casting, with the
result of bringing the letters out in relief, of which we know at
present only one instance,--the Sohgaura plate, mentioned again below.
The Mussulman inscriptions on stone were, it is believed, nearly always
carved in relief; and various Hindu inscriptions were done in the same
way in the Mussulman period: but only one instance of a stone record
prepared in that manner can as yet be cited for the earlier period; it
is an inscription on the pedestal of an image of Buddha, of the Gupta
period, found in excavations made not long ago at Sarnath.
Amongst the inscriptions on metal there is one that stands out by
itself, in respect of the peculiarity of having been incised on iron: it
is the short poem, constituting the epitaph of the Gupta king
Chandragupta II., which was composed in or about A.D. 415, and was
placed on record on the iron column, measuring 23 ft. 8 in. in height,
and estimated to weigh more than six tons, which stands at Meharauli
near Delhi. We have a very small number of short Buddhist votive
inscriptions on gold and silver, a larger number of records of various
kinds on brass, and a larger number still on bronze. The last-mentioned
consist chiefly of seals and stamps for making seals. And one of these
seal-stamps, belonging to about the commencement of the Christian era,
is of particular interest in presenting its legend in Greek characters
as well as in the two Indian alphabets which were then in use. For the
period, indeed, to which it belongs, there is nothing peculiar in the
use of the Greek characters; those characters were freely used on the
coins of India and adjacent territories, sometimes along with the native
characters, sometimes alone, from about 325 B.C. to the first quarter of
the 2nd century A.D.: but this seal-stamp, and the coins of the
Kshaharata king Nahapana (A.D. 78 to about 125), furnish the only
citable good instances of the use of the three alphabets all together.
For the most part, however, the known inscriptions on metal were placed
on sheets of copper, ranging in size from about 2(1/2) in. by 1(7/8) in.
in the case of the Sohgaura plate to as much as about 2 ft. 6 in. square
in the case of a record of 46 B.C. obtained at Sue-Vihar in the
neighbourhood of Bahawalpur in the Punjab. Some of these records on
copper were commemorative and dedicatory, and were deposited inside the
erections--relic-mounds, and, in the case of the Sue-Vihar plate, a
tower--to which they belonged. The usual copper record, however, was a
donative charter, in fact a title-deed, and passed as soon as it was
issued into private personal custody; and many of the known records of
this class have come to notice through being produced by the modern
possessors of them before official authorities, in the expectation of
establishing privileges which (it is hardly necessary to say) have long
since ceased to exist through the lapse of time, the dying out of
families of original holders, rights of conquest, and the many changes
of government that have taken place: but others have been found buried
in fields, and hidden in the walls and foundations of buildings. The
plates on which these inscriptions were incised vary greatly in the
number of the leaves, in the size and shape of them, and in the
arrangement of the records on them; partly, of course, according to the
lengths of individual records, but also according to particular customs
and fashions prevalent in different parts of the country and in
different periods of time. In some cases a single plate was used; and it
was inscribed sometimes on only one side of it, sometimes on both. More
often, however, more plates than one were used, and were connected
together by soldered rings; and the number ranges up to as many as
thirty-one in the case of a charter issued by the Chola king Rajendra
Chola I. in the period A.D. 1011 to 1037. It was customary that such of
the records on copper as were donative charters should be authenticated.
This was sometimes done by incising on the plates what purports to be
more or less an autograph signature of the king or prince from whom a
charter emanated. More usually, however, it was effected by attaching a
copper or bronze reproduction of the royal seal to the ring or to one of
the rings on which the plates were strung; and this practice has given
us another large and highly interesting series of Indian seals, some of
them of an extremely elaborate nature. In this class of records we have
a real curiosity in a charter issued in A.D. 1272 by Ramachandra, one of
the Yadava kings of Devagiri: this record is on three plates, each
measuring about 1 ft. 3 in. in width by 1 ft. 8(1/2) in. in height,
which are so massive as to weigh 59 lb. 2 oz.; and the weight of the
ring on which they were strung, and of an image of Garuda which was
secured to it by another ring, is 11 lb. 12 oz.: thus, the total weight
of this title-deed, which conveyed a village to fifty-seven Brahmans, is
no less than 70 lb. 14 oz.; appreciably more than half a hundredweight.
Amongst substances other than metal we can cite only one instance in
which crystal was used; this material was evidently found too hard for
any general use in the inscriptional line: the solitary instance is the
case of a short record found in the remains of a Buddhist stupa or
relic-mound at Bhattiprolu in the Kistna district, Madras. In various
parts of India there are found in large numbers small tablets of clay
prepared from stamps, sometimes baked into terra-cotta, sometimes left
to harden naturally. Objects of this class were largely used as votive
tablets, especially by the Buddhists; and their tablets usually present
the so-called Buddhist formula or creed: "Of those conditions which
spring from a cause, Tathagata (Buddha) has declared the cause and the
suppression of them; it is of such matters that he, the great ascetic,
discourses": but others, from Sunet in the Ludhiana district, Punjab,
show by the legends on them that the Saivas and Vaishnavas also
habitually made pious offerings of this kind on occasions of visiting
sacred places. Recent explorations, however, in the Gorakhpur and
Muzaffarpur districts have resulted in the discovery, in this class of
records, of great numbers of clay seals bearing various inscriptions,
which had been attached to documents sent to and fro between
administrative offices, both royal and municipal, between religious
establishments, and between private individuals: and amongst these we
have seals of the monastery at Kusinara, one of the places at which the
eight original portions of the corporeal relics of Buddha were enshrined
in relic-mounds, and also a seal-stamp used for making seals of the
monastery at Vethadipa, another of those places. And from Kathiawar we
have a similar seal-stamp which describes itself as the property "of the
prince and commander-in-chief Pushyena, son of the illustrious prince
Ahivarman, whose royal pedigree extends back unbroken to Jayadratha."
There are no indications that the use of brick for inscriptional
purposes was ever at all general in India, as it was in some other
eastern lands: but there have been found in the Ghazipur district
numerous bricks bearing the inscription "the glorious Kumaragupta," with
reference to either the first or the second Gupta king of that name, of
the 5th century A.D.; in the Gorakhpur district there have been found
brick tablets bearing Buddhist texts, one of which is a version in
Sanskrit of a short sermon preached by Buddha; and from the Jaunpur
district we have a brick tablet bearing an inscription which registers a
mortgage, made in A.D. 1217, of some lands as security for a loan.
Inscribed earthenware relic-receptacles have been found in the Bhopal
state: donative earthenware jars, bearing inscriptions, have been
obtained near Charsadda in the North-West Frontier province: and from
Kathiawar we have a piece of earthenware, apparently a fragment of a
huge pot, bearing an inscription which presents a date in A.D. 566-67
and the name of "the glorious Guhasena," one of the Maitraka princes of
Valabhi. For the great bulk of the inscriptions, however, stone was
used: but limitation of space prevents us from entering into any details
here, and only permits us to say that in this class the records are
found all over India on rocks, on isolated monolith columns and pillars,
of which some were erected simply to bear the records that were
published on them, others were placed in front of temples as flagstaffs
of the gods, and others were set up as pillars of victory in battle; on
relic-receptacles hidden away in the interiors of Buddhist stupas; on
external structural parts of stupas; on facades, walls, and other parts
of caves; on pedestals and other parts of images and statues, sometimes
of colossal size; on moulds for making seals; on walls, beams, pillars,
pilasters, and other parts of temples; and on specially prepared slabs
and tablets, sometimes built into the walls of temples and other
erections, sometimes set up inside temples or in the courtyards of them,
or in conspicuous places in village-sites and fields, where they have
occasionally in the course of time become buried.
Reasons why the inscriptions are so valuable.
The inscriptional records of India which have thus come down to us do
not, as far as they are known at present, pretend to the antiquity of
the Greek inscriptions of the Hellenic world; much less to that of the
inscriptions of Egypt and Assyria. But they are no less important; since
we are dependent on them for almost all our knowledge of the ancient
history of the country.
The primary reason for this is that the ancient Hindus, though by no
means altogether destitute of the historical instinct, were not writers
of historical books. In some of the _Puranas_, indeed, they have given us
chapters which purport to present the succession of their kings from the
commencement of the present age, the Kaliyuga, in 3102 B.C.: but the
chronological details of those chapters disclose the fault of treating
contemporaneous dynasties, belonging to different parts of India, as
successive dynasties ruling over one and the same territory; with the
result that they would place more than three centuries in the future from
the present time the great Gupta kings who reigned in Northern India from
A.D. 320 to about 530. They have given us, for Kashmir the
_Rajataramgini_, the first eight cantos of which, written by Kalhana in
A.D. 1148-49, purport to present the general history of that country,
with occasional items relating to India itself, from 2448 B.C., and to
give the exact length, even to months and days, of the reign of each king
of Kashmir from 1182 B.C.: but, while we may accept Kalhana as fairly
correct for his own time and for the preceding century or so, an
examination of the details of his work quickly exposes its imaginative
character and its unreliability for any earlier period: notably, he
places towards the close of the period 2448 to 1182 B.C. the great Maurya
king Asoka, whose real initial date was 264 B.C.; and he was obliged to
allot to one king, Ranaditya I., a reign of three centuries (A.D. 222 to
522, as placed by him) simply in order to save his own chronology. They
have given us historical romances, such as the _Harshacharita_ of Bana,
written in the 7th century, the _Vikramankadevacharita_ of Bilhana,
written about the beginning of the 12th century, and the Tamil poems, the
_Kalavali_, the _Kalingattu-Parani_, and the _Vikrama-Cholan-Ula_, the
first of which may be of somewhat earlier date than Bana's work, while
the second and third are of much the same time with Bilhana's: but, while
these present some charming reading in the poetical line, with much of
interest, and certainly a fair amount of important matter, they give us
no dates, and so no means without extraneous help of applying the
information that is deducible from them. Again, they have given us,
especially in Southern India, a certain amount of historical details in
the introductions and colophons of their literary works; and here they
have often furnished dates which give a practical shape to their
statements: but we quickly find that the historical matter is introduced
quite incidentally, to magnify the importance of the authors themselves
rather than to teach us anything about their patrons, and is not handled
with any particular care and fulness; and it would be but a sketchy and
imperfect history, and one relating to only a limited and comparatively
late period, that we could piece together even from these more precise
sources. The ancient Hindus, in short, have not bequeathed to us anything
that can in any way compare with the historical writings of their Greek
and Roman contemporaries. They have not even given us anything like the
_Dipavamsa_ of Ceylon, which, while it contains a certain amount of
fabulous matter, can be recognized as presenting a real and reliable
historical account of that island, taken from records written up during
the progress to the events themselves, from at any rate the time of Asoka
to about A.D. 350; or like the _Mahavamsa_, which, commenting on and
amplifying the details of the _Dipavamsa_, takes up a similar account
from the end of the period covered by that work. Even the Greek notices
of India, commencing with the accounts of the Asiatic campaign of
Alexander the Great, have told us more about its political history and
geography during the earlier times than have the Hindus themselves: and
in fact, in mentioning Sandrokottos, i.e. Chandragupta, the grandfather
of Asoka, and in furnishing details which fix his initial date closely
about 320 B.C., the Greeks gave us the first means of making a start
towards arranging the chronology of India on accurate lines. It is in
these circumstances, in the absence of any indigenous historical writings
of a plain, straightforward, and authentic nature, that the inscriptions
of India are of such great value. They are supplemented--and to an
important extent for at any rate the period from the end of Asoka's reign
in 227 B.C. to the commencement of the reign of Kanishka in 58 B.C., and
again from about a century later to the rise of the Gupta dynasty in A.D.
320--by the numismatic remains. But the coins of India present no dates
until nearly the end of the 2nd century A.D.; the case of Parthia, which
has yielded dated coins from only 38 B.C., illustrates well the
difficulty of arranging undated coins in chronological order even when
the assistance of historical books is available; and what we may deduce
from the coins of India is still to be put into a final shape in
accordance with what we can determine from the inscriptions. In short,
the inscriptions of India are the only sure grounds of historical results
in every line of research connected with its ancient past; they regulate
everything that we can learn from coins, architecture, art, literature,
tradition, or any other source.
That is one reason why the inscriptions of India are so valuable; they
fill the void caused by the absence of historical books. Another reason
is found in the great number of them and the wide area that is covered
by them. They come from all parts of the country: from Shahbazgarhi in
the north, in the Yusufzai subdivision of the Peshawar district, to the
ancient Pandya territory in the extreme south of the peninsula; and from
Assam in the east to Kathiawar in the west. For the time anterior to
about A.D. 400, we already have available in published form, more or
less complete, the contents of between 1100 and 1200 records, large and
small; and the explorations of the Archaeological Department are
constantly bringing to light, particularly from underground sites, more
materials for that period. For the time onwards from that point, we have
similarly available the contents of some 10,000 or 11,000 records of
Southern India, and of at any rate between 700 and 800 records of
Northern India where racial antagonism came more into play and worked
more destruction of Hindu remains than in the south.
Another reason is found in the fact that from the first century B.C. the
inscriptions are for the most part specifically dated: some in various
eras the nature and application of which are now thoroughly well
understood, often with also a mention of the year of the twelve-years
or of the sixty-years cycle of the planet Jupiter; others in the regnal
years of kings whose periods are now well fixed. And, in addition to
usually stating the month and the day along with the year, the
inscriptions sometimes give, under the influence of Hindu astrology,
other details so exact that we can determine, even to the actual hour,
the occurrence of the event registered by a particular record.
A final reason is found in the precise nature of the inscriptions. A
certain proportion of them consists of plain statements of
events,--recitals of the pedigrees and achievements of kings, records of
the carrying out of public works, epitaphs of kings, heroes, and saints,
compacts of political alliance, and so on; and some of these present, in
fact, short historical compositions which illustrate well what the
ancient Hindus might have done if they had felt any special call to
write plain and veracious chronicles on matter-of-fact lines. But we are
indebted for the great bulk of the inscriptions, not to any historical
instinct, but to the religious side of the Hindu character, and to the
constant desire of the Hindus to make donations on every possible
occasion. The inscriptions devoted simply to the propagation of morality
and religion are not very numerous: the most notable ones in this class
are the edicts of Asoka, which we shall notice again farther on. The
general object of the inscriptions was to register gifts and endowments,
made sometimes to private individuals, but more usually to gods, to
priests on behalf of temples and charitable institutions, and to
religious communities. And, as the result of this, in the vast majority
of the inscriptional remains we have a mass of title-deeds of real
property, and of certificates of the right to duties, taxes, fees,
perquisites, and other privileges. Now, the essential part of the
records was of course the specification of the details of the donor, of
the donee, and of the donation. And we have to bear in mind that not
only are the donative records by far the most abundant of all, but also,
among them, by far the most numerous are those which we may call the
records of royal donations; by which we mean grants that were made
either by the kings themselves, or by the great feudatory nobles, or by
provincial governors and other high officials who had the royal
authority to alienate state lands and to assign allotments from the
state revenues: also, that many of them register, not simply the gift of
small holdings, but grants of entire villages, and large and permanent
assignments from the public revenues. It is to these facts that we are
indebted for the great value of the records from the historical point of
view. The donor of state lands or of an assignment from the public
revenues must show his authority for his acts. A provincial governor or
other high official must specify his own rank and territorial
jurisdiction, and name the king under whom he holds office. A great
feudatory noble will often give a similar reference to his paramount
sovereign, in addition to making his own position clear. And it is
neither inconsistent with the dignity of a king, nor unusual, for
something to be stated about his pedigree in charters and patents issued
by him or in his name. The records give from very early times a certain
amount of genealogical information. More and more information of that
kind was added as time went on. The recital of events was introduced, to
magnify the glory and importance of the donors, and sometimes to
commemorate the achievements of recipients. And it was thus, not with
the express object of recording history, but in order to intensify the
importance of everything connected with religion and to secure grantees
in the possession of properties conveyed to them, that there was
gradually accumulated almost the whole of the great mass of
inscriptional records upon which we are so dependent for our knowledge
of the ancient history of India in all its branches.
Survey of the inscriptions.
Coming now to a survey of the inscriptions themselves, we must premise
that India is divided, from the historical point of view, though not so
markedly in some other respects, into two well-defined parts, Northern
and Southern. A classical name of Northern India is Aryavarta, "the
abode of the Aryas, the excellent or noble people." Another name, which
figures both in literature and in the inscriptions, is Uttarapatha, "the
path of the north, the northern road." And, as a classical name of
Southern India answering to that we have Dakshinapatha, "the path of the
south, the southern road," from the first component of which name comes
our modern term Deccan, Dekkan, or Dekhan. Sanskrit literature names as
the dividing-line between Aryavarta or the Uttarapatha and the
Dakshinapatha, i.e. between Northern and Southern India, sometimes the
Vindhya mountains, sometimes the river Nerbudda (Narmada, Narbada)
which, flowing close along the south of the Vindhya range, empties
itself into the gulf of Cambay near Broach, in Gujarat, Bombay. The
river seems, on the whole, to furnish the better dividing-line of the
two. But it does not reach, any more than the range exactly extends,
right across India from sea to sea. And, to complete the dividing-line
beyond the sources of the Narbada, which are in the Maikal range and
close to the Amarkantak hill in the Rewa State, Baghelkhand, we have to
follow some such course as first the Maniari river, from its sources,
which are in that same neighbourhood but on the south of the Maikal
range, to the point where, after it has joined the Seonath, the united
rivers flow into the Mahanadi, near Seori-Narayan in the Bilaspur
district, Central Provinces, and then the Mahanadi itself, which flows
into the bay of Bengal near Cuttack in Orissa. Even so, however, we have
only a somewhat rough dividing-line between the historical Northern and
Southern India; and the distinction must not be understood too strictly
in connexion with the territories lying close on the north and the south
of the line sketched above. In Western India, Kathiawar and all the
portions of Gujarat above Broach lie to the north of the Narbada; but
from the palaeographic point of view, if not so much from the
historical, they belong essentially to Southern India. Our modern
Central India lies entirely in Northern India, but has various
palaeographic connexions with Southern India. Our Central Provinces
extend in the Saugar district into Northern India; and that portion of
them presents in ancient times both northern and southern
characteristics. Eastern India may be defined as consisting of Bengal,
with Orissa and Assam: it belongs to Northern India.
The inscriptional remains of India, as known at present, practically
begin with the records of Asoka, the great Maurya king of Northern
India,--grandson of that king Chandragupta whose name was written by the
Greeks as Sandrokottos,--who reigned 264 to 227 B.C. The state of the
alphabets, indeed, in the time of Asoka renders it certain that the art
of writing must have been practised in India for a long while before his
period; and it gives us every reason to hope that systematic
exploration, especially of buried sites, will eventually result in the
discovery of records framed by some of his predecessors or by their
subjects. But those discoveries have still to be made; and matters stand
just now as follows. From before the time of Asoka we have an
inscription on a relic-vase from a stupa or relic-mound at Piprahwa in
the north-east corner of the Basti district, United Provinces, which
preserves the memory of the slaughtered kinsmen of Buddha, the Sakyas of
Kapilavastu according to the subsequent traditional nomenclature. We may
perhaps place before his time the record on the Sohgaura plate, from the
Gorakhpur district, United Provinces, which notifies the establishment
of two public storehouses at a junction of three great highways of
vehicular traffic to meet any emergent needs of persons using these
roads. And we may possibly decide hereafter to refer to the same period
a few other records which are not at present regarded as being quite so
early. But, practically, the known inscriptions of India begin with the
records of that king who calls himself in them "the king
Devanampiya-Piyadassi, the Beloved of the Gods, He of Gracious Mien,"
but who is best known as Asoka by the name given to him in the
literature of India and Ceylon and in an inscription of A.D. 150 at
Junagadh (Junagarh) in Kathiawar. From his time onwards we have records
from all parts in constantly increasing numbers, particularly during the
earlier periods, from caves, rock-cut temples, and Buddhist stupas. Many
of them, however, are of only a dedicatory nature, and, valuable as they
are for purposes of religion, geography, and other miscellaneous lines
of research, are not very helpful in the historical line. We are
interested here chiefly in the historical records; and we can notice
only the most prominent ones even among them.
Of this king Asoka we have now thirty-five different records, some of
them in various recensions. Amongst them, the most famous ones are the
seven pillar-edicts and the fourteen rock-edicts, found in various
versions, and in a more or less complete state, at different places from
Shahbazgarhi in the Yusufzai country in the extreme north-west, to
Radhia, Mathia, and Rampurwa in the Champaran district, Bengal, at
Dhauli in the Cuttack district of Orissa, at Jaugada in the Ganjam
district, Madras, at Girnar (Junagadh) in Kathiawar, and even at Sopara
in the Thana district, Bombay. These edicts were thus published in
conspicuous positions in or near towns, or close to highways frequented
by travellers and traders, or in the neighbourhood of sacred places
visited by pilgrims, so that they might be freely seen and perused. And
the object of them was to proclaim the firm determination of Asoka to
govern his realm righteously and kindly in accordance with the duty of
pious kings, and with considerateness for even religious beliefs other
than the Brahmanical faith which he himself at first professed, and to
acquaint his subjects with certain measures that he had taken to that
end, and to explain to them how they might co-operate with him in his
objects. But, in addition to mentioning certain contemporaneous foreign
kings, Antiochus II. (Theos) of Syria, Ptolemy Philadelphus of Egypt,
Antigonus Gonatas of Macedonia, Magas of Cyrene, and Alexander II. of
Epirus, they yield items of internal history, in detailing some of
Asoka's administrative arrangements; in locating the capital of his
empire at Pataliputra (Patna), and seats of viceroys at Ujjeni (Ujjain)
and Takhasila (Taxila); in giving the names of some of the leading
peoples of India, particularly the Cholas, the Pandyas, and the Andhras;
and in recording the memorable conquest of the Kalinga country, the
attendant miseries of which first directed the thoughts of the king to
religion and to solicitude for the welfare of all his subjects. Another
noteworthy record of Asoka is that notification, containing his Last
Edict, his dying speech, issued by local officials just after his death,
which is extant in various recensions at Sahasram, Rupnath, and Bairat
in Northern India, and at Brahmagiri, Siddapura, and Jatinga-Ramesvara
in Mysore. Some three years before the end of his long reign of
thirty-seven years, Asoka became a convert to Buddhism, and was admitted
as an Upasaka or lay-worshipper. Eventually, he formally joined the
Buddhist order; and, following a not infrequent custom of ancient Indian
kings, he abdicated, took the vows of a monk, and withdrew to spend his
remaining days in religious retirement in a cave-dwelling on Suvarnagiri
(Songir), one of the hills surrounding the ancient city of Girivraja,
below Rajagriha (Rajgir), in the Patna district in Behar. And there,
about a year later, in his last moments, he delivered the address
incorporated in this notification, proclaiming as the only true religion
that which had been promulgated by Buddha, and expanding the topic of
the last words of that great teacher: "Work out your salvation by
diligence!" This record, it may be added, is also of interest because,
whereas such of the other known records of Asoka as are dated at all are
dated according to the number of years elapsed after his anointment to
the sovereignty, it is dated 256 years after the death of Buddha, which
event took place in 483 B.C.
For the two centuries or nearly so next after the end of the reign of
Asoka, we have chiefly a large number of short inscriptions which are of
much value in miscellaneous lines of research--palaeography, geography,
religion, and so on. But historical records are by no means wanting; and
we may mention in particular the following. From the caves in the
Nagarjuni Hills in the Gaya district, Bengal, we have (along with three
of the inscriptions of Asoka himself) three records of a king Dasaratha
who, according to the _Vishnu-Purana_, was a grandson of Asoka. From the
stupa at Bharaut in the Nagod state, Central India, we have a record
which proves the existence of the dynasty of the Sunga kings, for whom
the _Puranas_, placing them next after the line of Chandragupta and
Asoka, indicate the period 183 to 71 B.C. Two of the records from the
stupa at Bhattiprolu in the Kistna district, Madras, give us a king of
those parts, reigning about 200 B.C., whose name appears both as Kubiraka
and as Khubiraka. From Besnagar in the Gwalior state we have an
inscription, referable to the period 175 to 135 B.C., which mentions a
king of Central India, by name Bhagabhadra, and also mentions, as his
contemporary, one of the Greek kings of the Punjab, Antalkidas, whose
name is familiar from his coins in the form Antialkidas. From the
Hathigumpha cave near Cuttack, in Orissa, we have a record, to be placed
about 140 B.C., of king Kharavela, a member of a dynasty which reigned in
that part of India. From a cave at Pabhosa in the Allahabad district,
United Provinces, we have two records which make known to us a short
succession of kings of Adhichatra, otherwise known as Ahichchhattra. From
a cave at the Nanaghat Pass in the Poona district, Bombay, we have a
record of queen Nayanika, wife of one of the great Satavahana-Satakarni
kings of the Deccan. And from the stupa No. 1 at Sanchi in the Bhopal
state, Central India, we have a record of a king Sri-Satakarni, belonging
to perhaps another branch of the same great stock.
The historical records become more numerous from the time of the Kushan
king Kanishka or Kanishka, who began to reign in 58 B.C., and founded
the so-called Vikrama era, the great historical era of Northern India,
beginning in that year.[27] For the period of him and his immediate
successors, Vasishka, Huvishka and Vasudeva, we have now between seventy
and eighty inscriptions, ranging from 54 B.C. to A.D. 42, and disclosing
a sway which reached at its height from Bengal to Kabul: we are indebted
for some of these to the Buddhists, in connexion with whose faith the
memory of Kanishka was preserved by tradition, but for most of them to
the Jains, who seem to have been at that time the more numerous sect in
the central part of his dominions.
The dynasty of Kanishka was succeeded by another foreign ruler,
Gondophernes, popularly known as Gondophares, whose coins indicate that,
in addition to a large part of north-western India and Sind, his
dominions included Kabul, Kandahar, and Seistan. This king is well known
to Christian tradition, in connexion with the mission of St Thomas the
Apostle to the East. And the tradition is substantially supported by an
inscription from Takht-i-Bahai in the Yusufzai country on the north-west
frontier, which, like some of his coins, mentions him as Guduphara or
Gunduphara, and proves that he was reigning there in A.D. 47.
Gondophernes was followed by the Kadphises kings, belonging to another
branch of the Kushan tribe, who perhaps extended their sway farther into
India, as far at least as Mathura (Muttra), and reigned for about
three-quarters of a century. For their period, and in fact for the whole
time to the rise of the Guptas in A.D. 320 we have as yet but scanty
help from the inscriptions in respect of the political history of
Northern India: we are mostly dependent on the coins, which tend to
indicate that that part of India was then broken up into a number of
small sovereignties and tribal governments. An inscription, however,
from Panjtar in the Yusufzai territory mentions, without giving his
name, a Kushan king whose dominion included that territory in A.D. 66.
And an inscription of A.D. 242 from Mathura has been understood to
indicate that some descendant of the same stock was then reigning there.
The inscriptional records for that period belong chiefly to Southern
India.
Meanwhile, however, in the south-west corner of Northern India, namely
in Kathiawar, there arose another foreign king, apparently of Parthian
extraction, by name Nahapana, described in his records, whether by a
family name or by a tribal appellation, as a Chhaharata or Kshaharata,
in whom we have the founder of the so-called Saka era, the principal
era of Southern India, beginning in A.D. 78: in respect of him we learn
from the _Periplus of the Erythraean Sea_ that he was reigning between
A.D. 80 and 89, and from inscriptions that he was still reigning in A.D.
120 and 124: at the latter time, his dominions included Nasik and other
territories on the south of the Narbada; and the _Periplus_ names as his
capital a town which it calls Minnagar, and which Ptolemy would locate
in such a manner as to suggest that it may be identified with the modern
Dohad in the Panch Mahals district of Gujarat, Bombay. Nahapana was
overthrown, and his family was entirely wiped out, soon after A.D. 125,
by the great Satavahana king Gautamiputra-Sri-Satakarni, who thereby
recovered the territories on the south of the Narbada. On the north of
that river, however, he was followed by a line of kings founded by his
viceroy Chashtana, son of Ghsamotika, to whom Ptolemy, mentioning him as
Tiastanes, assigns Ujjain as his capital: these names, again, show a
foreign origin; but, from the time of his son Jayadaman, the descendants
of Chashtana became Hinduized, and mostly bore purely Indian
appellations. The coins show that the descendants of Chashtana ruled
till about A.D. 388, when they were overthrown by the great Gupta
dynasty of Northern India. Only a few of their inscriptional records
have been discovered: but amongst them a very noteworthy one is the
Junagadh (Junagarh) inscription of Chashtana's grandson, Rudradaman,
bearing a date in A.D. 150; it is remarkable as being the earliest known
long inscription written entirely in Sanskrit.
From Southern India we have, at Nasik, inscriptions of the Satavahana
king Gautampputra-Sri-Satakarni, mentioned just above, and of his son
Vasisthiputra-Sri-Pulumayi, and of another king of that line named
Gautamiputra-Sri-Yajna-Satakarni; and other records of the
last-mentioned king come from Kanheri near Bombay, and from the Kistna
district, Madras, and testify to the wide extent of the dominions of the
line to which he belonged. The records of this king carry us on to the
opening years of the 3rd century, soon after which time, in those parts
at any rate, the power of the Satavahana kings came to an end. And we
have next, also from Nasik, an inscription of an Abhira king named
Isvarasena, son of Sivadatta; in this last-mentioned person we probably
have the founder of the so-called Kalachuri or Chedi era, beginning in
A.D. 248 or 249, which we trace in Western India for some centuries
before the time when it was transferred to, or revived in, Central
India, and was invested with its later appellation: we trace it notably
in the records of a line of kings who called themselves Traikutakas,
apparently from Trikuta as the ancient name of the great mountain
Harischandragad in the Western Ghauts, in the Ahmadnagar district.
We can, of course, mention in this account only the most prominent of
the inscriptional records. Keeping for the present to Southern India, we
have from Banawasi in the North Kanara district, Bombay, and from
Malavallji in the Shimoga district, Mysore, two inscriptions of a king
Harit putra-Satakarni of the Vinhukadda-Chutu family, reigning at
Vaijayanti, i.e. Banawasi, which disclose the existence there of another
branch, apparently known as the Chutu family and having its origin at a
place named Vishnugarta, of the great stock to which the
Satavahana-Satakarnis belonged. And another Malavalli inscription, of a
king Siva-Skandavarman, shows that the Satakarnis of that locality were
followed by a line of kings known as the Kadambas, who left descendants
who continued to rule until about A.D. 650. From the other side of
Southern India, an inscription from the stupa at Jaggayyapeta in the
Kistna district, Madras, referable to the 3rd century A.D., gives us a
king Madhariputra-Sri-Vira-Purushadatta, of the race of Ikshvaku. And
some Prakrit copperplate inscriptions from the same district, referable
to the 4th century, disclose a line of Pallava kings at Kanchi, the
modern Conjeeveram near Madras, whose descendants, from about A.D. 550,
are well known from the later records.
Reverting to Northern India, we have from the extreme north-west a few
inscriptions dated in the era of 58 B.C. which carry us on to A.D. 322.
The tale is then taken up chiefly by the records of the great Gupta
kings of Pataliputra, i.e. Patna, who rose to power in A.D. 320, and
gradually extended their sway until it assumed dimensions almost
commensurate with those of Asoka and Kanishka: the records of this
series are somewhat numerous; and a very noteworthy one amongst them is
the inscription of Samudragupta, incised at some time about A.D. 375 on
one of the pillars of Asoka now standing at Allahabad, which gives us a
wide insight into the political divisions, with their contemporaneous
rulers, of both Northern and Southern India: it is also interesting
because it, or another record of the same king at Eran in the Saugar
district, Central Provinces, marks the commencement of the habitual use
of Sanskrit for inscriptional purposes. The inscriptions of the Gupta
series run on to about A.D. 530. But the power of the dynasty had by
that time become much curtailed, largely owing to an irruption of the
Huns under Toramana and Mihirakula, who established themselves at
Sialkot, the ancient Sakala, in the Punjab. We have inscriptional
records of these two persons, not only from Kura in the Salt Range, not
very far from Sialkot, but also from Eran and from Gwalior. And next
after these we have inscriptions from Mandasor in Malwa, notably on two
great monolith pillars of victory, of a king Vishnuvardhana-Yasodharman,
which show that he overthrew Mihirakula shortly before A.D. 532, and,
describing him as subjugating territories to which not even the Guptas
and the Huns had been able to penetrate, indicate that he in his turn
established for a while another great paramount sovereignty in Northern
India.
We have thus brought our survey of the inscriptions of India down to the
6th century A.D. There then arose various dynasties in different parts
of the country: in Northern India, in Kathiawar, the Maitrakas of
Valabhi; at Kanauj, the Maukharis, who, after no great lapse of time,
were followed by the line to which belonged the great Harshavardhana,
"the warlike lord (as the southern records style him) of all the region
of the north;" and, in Behar, another line of Guptas, usually known as
the Guptas of Magadha: in Southern India, the Chalukyas, who, holding
about A.D. 625 the whole northern part of Southern India from sea to
sea, then split up into two branches, the Western Chalukyas of Badami in
the Bijapur district, Bombay, and the Eastern Chalukyas of Vengi in the
Godavari district, Madras; and, below them, the successors of the
original Pallavas of Kanchi (Conjeeveram). These all had their time, and
passed away. And they and their successors have left us so great a
wealth of inscriptional records that no further detailed account can be
attempted within the limits available here. We must pass on to a few
brief remarks about the language of the records and the characters in
which they were written.
Alphabets.
The inscriptions of Asoka present two alphabets, which differ
radically and widely: one of them is known as the Brahmi; the other,
as the Kharoshthi or Kharoshtri. For the decipherment of the Brahmi
alphabet we are indebted to James Prinsep, who determined the value of
practically all the letters between 1834 and 1837. The decipherment of
the Kharoshthi alphabet was a more difficult and a longer task: it was
virtually finished, some twenty years later, by the united efforts of
C. Masson, Prinsep, C. L. Lassen, H. H. Wilson, E. Norris, Sir A.
Cunningham, and John Dowson; but there are still a few points of
detail in respect of which finality has not been attained.
The Kharoshthi script was written from right to left, and is
undeniably of Semitic origin; and the theory about it, based on the
known fact that the valley of the Indus was a Persian satrapy in the
time of Darius (521-485 B.C.), is that the Aramaic script was then
introduced into that territory, and that the Kharoshthi is an
adaptation of it. Except in a few intrusive cases, the use of the
Kharoshthi in India was limited to the valley of the Indus, and to the
Punjab as defined on the south by the territory watered by the Bias
(Beas) and the Satlaj (Sutlej): and the eastern locality of the
meeting of the two alphabets is marked by coins bearing Kharoshthi and
Brahmi legends which come from the districts of the Jalandhar
(Jullundhur) division, and by two short rock-cut records, each
presented in both the alphabets, at Pathyar and Kanhiara in the Kangra
valley. Outside India, this script was notably current in Afghanistan;
and documents written in it have in recent years been found in Chinese
Turkestan. In India it continued in use, as far as our present
knowledge goes, down to A.D. 343.
The Brahmi alphabet, written from left to right, belonged to the
remainder of India; but it must also have been current in learned
circles even in the territory where popular usage favoured the other
script. Various views about its origin have been advanced: amongst
them is the theory that it was derived from the oldest north-Semitic
alphabet, which prevailed from Phoenicia to Mesopotamia, and may, it
is held, have been introduced into India by traders at some time about
800 B.C. It is, however, admitted that the earliest known form of the
Brahmi is a script framed by Brahmans for writing Sanskrit. Also, the
theory is largely based on a coin from Eran, in the Saugar district,
Central Provinces, presenting a Brahmi legend running retrograde from
right to left; from which it is inferred that that was the original
direction of this writing, and that the script eventually assumed the
other direction, which alone it has in the inscriptions, after
passing, like the Greek, through a stage in which the lines were
written in both directions alternately. But we can cite many instances
in which ancient die-sinkers were careless, wholly or partially, in
the matter of reversing the legends on their dies, with the result
that not only syllables frequently, but sometimes entire words, stand
in reverse on the coins themselves; moreover, the Eran coin, being one
of the earliest known Indian coins bearing a legend at all, may quite
possibly belong to a period before the time when the desirability of
working in reverse on the dies presented itself to the Indian
die-sinkers. In all the circumstances, the evidence of the Eran coin
cannot be regarded as conclusive; and we require some inscription on
stone, or at least some longer record on metal than a brief legend of
five syllables, to satisfy us that the Brahmi writing ever had a
direction different from that which it has in the inscriptions.
Further, if there is any radical connexion between the Brahmi and the
Semitic alphabet indicated above, so many curious and apparently
capricious changes must have been made, in adapting that alphabet,
that it would seem more probable that the two scripts were derived
from a joint original source. In view of the high state of
civilization to which the Hindus had evidently attained even before
the time of Chandragupta, the grandfather of Asoka, it must still be
regarded as possible that they were the independent inventors of that
which was emphatically their national alphabet. The Brahmi alphabet is
the parent of all the modern Hindu scripts, including on one side the
Nagari or Devanagari, and on the other the widely dissimilar rounded
forms of the Kanarese, Tamil, Telugu, and other southern alphabets;
and the inscriptions enable us to trace clearly the gradual
development of all the modern forms.
Languages.
The great classical Indian language, Sanskrit, is not found in any
inscriptional records of the earliest times. It is not, however, to be
supposed therefrom that the use and cultivation of Sanskrit ever lay
dormant, and that there was a revival of this language when it did
eventually come to be used in the inscriptions; the case simply is
that, during the earlier periods, Sanskrit was not known much, if at
all, outside the Brahmanical and other literary and priestly circles,
and so was not recognized as a suitable medium for the notifications
which were put on record in the inscriptions for the information of
the people at large.
In Northern India, the inscriptions of the period before 58 B.C.
present various early Prakrits, i.e. vernaculars more or less derived
from Sanskrit or brought into a line with it. From 58 B.C., however,
the influence of Sanskrit began to manifest itself in the
inscriptions, with the result that the records present from that time
a language which is conveniently known as the mixed dialect, meaning
neither exactly Prakrit nor exactly Sanskrit, but Prakrit with an
intermixture of Sanskrit terminations and some other features; and we
have, in fact, from Mathura (Muttra), a locality which has yielded
interesting remains in various directions, a short Brahmanical
inscription of 33 B.C. which was written wholly in Sanskrit. The mixed
dialect appears to have been the general one for inscriptional
purposes in Northern India until about A.D. 320. But a remarkable
exception is found in the inscription of Rudradaman, dated in A.D.
150, at Junagadh in Kathiawar (mentioned on a preceding page), which
is a somewhat lengthy record composed in thoroughly good literary
Sanskrit prose. Also, the extant inscriptions of the descendants of
Rudradaman--(but only four of their records, ranging from A.D. 181 to
205, are at present available for study)--are in almost quite correct
Sanskrit; and this suggests that, from his time, the language may have
been habitually used for inscriptional purposes in the dominions of
his dynasty. That, however, is only a matter of conjecture; and
elsewhere pure and good Sanskrit, without any Prakrit forms, appears
next, and is found in verse as well as in prose, in the two
inscriptions from Eran and Allahabad, referable to the period about
A.D. 340 to 375, of the great Gupta king Samudragupta. From that time
onwards, as far as our present knowledge goes, Sanskrit, with a very
rare introduction of Prakrit or vernacular forms, was practically the
only inscriptional language in the northern parts of India. We can,
however, cite a record of A.D. 862 from the neighbourhood of Jodhpur
in Rajputana, the body of which was written in Maharashtri Prakrit.
In Southern India we have an instance of the mixed dialect in the
Nasik inscription, referable to A.D. 257 or 258, of the Abhira king
Isvarasena, son of Sivadatta, which has been mentioned on a preceding
page. With the exception, however, of that record and of the few which
are mentioned just below, the inscriptional language of Southern India
appears to have been generally Prakrit of one kind or another until
about A.D. 400, or perhaps even somewhat later. Sanskrit figures first
in one of the records at Nasik of Rishabhadatta (Ushavadata),
son-in-law of the Kshaharata king Nahapana, which consequently gives
it almost as early an appearance in the south as that which is
established for it in the north; but it is confined in this instance
to a preamble which recites the previous donations and good works of
Rishabhadatta; the record passes into Prakrit for the practical
purpose for which it was framed. Sanskrit figures next, in an almost
correct form, in the short inscription of not much later date at
Kanheri, near Bombay, of the queen (her name is not extant) of
Vasishthiputra-Sri-Satakarni. It next appears in certain formulae, and
benedictive and imprecatory verses, which stand at the end of some of
the Prakrit records of the Pallava series referable to the 4th
century; but here we have quotations from books, not instances of
original composition. We have a Sanskrit record, obtained in Khandesh
but probably belonging to some part of Gujarat, of a king named
Rudradasa, which is perhaps dated in A.D. 367. But the next southern
inscription in Sanskrit, of undeniable date, is a record of A.D. 456,
belonging to the Vyara subdivision of the Baroda state in Gujarat, of
the Traikutaka king Dahrasena. The records of the early Kadamba kings
of Banawasi in North Kanara, Bombay, exhibit the use of Sanskrit from
an early period in the 6th century; and records of the Pallava kings
show it from perhaps a somewhat earlier time on the other side of
India. The records of the Chalukya kings present Sanskrit from A.D.
578 onwards. And from this latter date the language figures freely in
the southern records. But some of the vernaculars, in their older
forms, shortly begin to present themselves alongside of it; and,
without entirely superseding Sanskrit even to the latest times, the
use of them for inscriptional purposes became rapidly more and more
extensive. The vernacular that first makes its appearance is Kanarese,
in a record of the Chalukya king Mangalesa, of the period A.D. 597 to
608, at Badami in the Bijapur district, Bombay. Tamil appears next,
between about A.D. 610 and 675, in records of the Pallava king
Mahendravarman I. at Vallam in the Chingalpat (Chingleput) district,
Madras, and of his great-grandson Paramesvaravarman I. from Kuram in
the same district. Telugu appears certainly in A.D. 1011, in a record
of the Eastern Chalukya king Vimaladitya; and it is perhaps given to
us in A.D. 843 or 844 by a record of his ancestor Vishnuvardhana V.;
in the latter case, however, the authenticity of the document is not
certain. Malayalam appears about A.D. 1150, in inscriptions of the
rulers of Kerala from the Travancore state. And on the colossal image
of Gommatesvara at Sravana-Belgola, in Mysore, there are two lines of
Marathi, notifying for the benefit of pilgrims from the Maratha
country the names of the persons who caused the image and the
enclosure to be made, which are attributed to the first quarter of the
12th century: this language, however, figures first for certain in a
record of A.D. 1207, of the time of the Devagiri-Yadava king Singhana,
from Khandesh in the north of Bombay.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.--The systematic publication of the Indian inscriptions
has not gone far. Cunningham inaugurated a _Corpus Inscriptionum
Indicarum_, by giving us in 1877 the first volume of it, dealing with
the records of Asoka; but the only other volume which has been
published is vol. iii., by Fleet, dealing with the records of the
Gupta series. The other published materials are mostly to be found
here and there in the _Journals_ of the Royal Asiatic Society of
London, its Bombay branch, and the Asiatic Society of Bengal, in the
_Reports_ of the various Archaeological Surveys, and in the _Indian
Antiquary_, the _Epigraphia Indica_ and the _Epigraphia Carnatica_;
and much work has still to be done in bringing them together according
to the periods and dynasties to which they relate, and in revising
some of them in the light of new discoveries and the teachings of
later research. The authority on Indian palaeography is Buhler's work,
published in 1896 as part 2 of vol. i of the _Grundriss der
Indo-Arischen Philologie und Altertumskunde_; an English version of it
was issued in 1904 as an appendix to the _Indian Antiquary_, vol.
xxxiii. (J. F. F.)