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The Indian Analyst
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South Indian Inscriptions |
EPIGRAPHIA INDICA
decline of the Guptas and had made himself emperor of Eastern India by welding together Kāmarūpa, Ḍavāka and Samataṭa into one empire and had declared his overlordship over them by the performance of an Aśvamēdha sacrifice. The Topography of the Inscription.─An excellent description of the topography of the place has already been quoted from Mr. Nath’s article. It is only necessary to add a few comments. The rivulet Baḍagaṅgā was barely five yards in width in January, when I visited the place. The lake into which Baḍagaṅgā is described by Mr. Nath to have widened at the site of the inscription, is nothing more than a pool, barely twenty feet in diameter. The figures of a dvārapāla with a spear and a Hanumān on the left rock spoken of by Mr. Nath appeared to me to be rude representations of a tall female figure stooping and thrusting forward something like a spear, and a half-kneeling man in a fighting attitude, a little below. The second and the longest line of the inscription is 24″ long. The fourth and the shortest is only 7″.
The characters belong to the Eastern variety of the Gupta alphabet. Single letters are generally about an inch high, but some of the conjunct letters are more than 2″ in height. The script is similar to that noticed in the copper plates of the same period found in Bengal. There is little distinction between s and sh, excepting that the former appears to have the right perpendicular stroke a little longer. Ya is replaced by yā (ll. 2 and 3) and once compounded in ryya. In all these places, it has the picturesque form with a wavy tail on the left, represented so well in the first plate of Dharmāditya published by Mr. Pargiter in the Indian Antiquary for 1910. Much discussion has centred round the different forms of y of this period. As a recently discovered plate of Samāchāradēva unexpectedly and uniformly shows only old forms of this letter, the whole question will have to be considered again, when I shall be editing that plate for this journal in the near future. The form of ya in this new rock inscription of Bhūtivarman will be duly considered in that connection. The superscript r occurs twice, doubling the consonants m and y. Ha appears as a single stroke bent to the left as in the Baigram plate of the time of Kumāragupta.1 The language of the record is correct Sanskrit. The inscription, as it stands, appears rather incomplete. It is hardly a sentence, and in place of the declaratory label─‘This is the Āśrama of Āryyaguṇa’, we would have expected the inscription to say that it was Āryyaguṇa who built the Āśrama, in that particular month. The word āśrama, it should be noted, is used both in masculine and in neuter genders. The date of the inscription is very important. In discussing the date of Bhūtivarman, we should remember that the following is the genealogy from Bhāskaravarman upwards :─
Bhūtivarman────Vijñānavatī Let us assume that the kings were all the eldest sons of their parents, born about their 20th year, and assume further that Bhāskara was nearly of the same age as Harsha. Mr. Vaidya calculated the date of Harsh’s birth as the 4th June, A.D. 590 from the date available in the Harshacharita.2 Professor Yogesh Chandra Roy of Bankura, a reputed astronomer, calculated the date independently for me and he also arrived at the same conclusion. So, if Bhāskara was born about A. D. 590, Susthita was born about A. D. 570, Sthita about A.D. 550, Chandramukha about A.D. 530 and Bhūti about A.D. 510 equivalent to 190 G. E. If Bhūti lived for sixty years and came to the throne at about the thirtieth year of his age, he may be assumed to have ascended __________________________________
[1] Above, Vol. XXI, pp. 78 ff. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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