South Indian Inscriptions

EPIGRAPHIA INDICA

L.2 begins below the final t(r)iof griṇayat(r)i and continues under the gap after this word and further below l.1, at an increasing distance. The first clause, tasa ye patre apamna continues the statement about the condition of the relics in l.1. Majumdar explains apamna as apamukta ‘ abandoned’, but apa could not become apa and mukta must appear as muta. Moreover, the casket is the same which was used for the Menandros inscription, and it is difficult to accept Majumdar’s translation ‘ and the receptacle of that (relic) has been cast aside’. What we seem to know is that the lid was damaged, and apamna must mean something like ‘ defective’. I take it to be appomna, from appa Skt. alpa, and omna formed with the suffix uka from mna, which occurs in the sense of ‘ defective’ in Ardhamāgadhī, so that the meaning would be ‘ slightly defective’ which suits the context perfectly.

Then comes the date portion : Vashaye paṁchamaye 4 1 Veś(r)akh(r)asa masasa divasa paṁchaviś(r)aye ‘ in the fifth, 5, year on the 25th day of the month Vaiśākha’. The year is clearly a regnal year, and since the ruler is mentioned in the last part of the inscription nothing more needs to be added. But then we have the short inscription B above the final portion of the date and protruding beyond it to the left. If I am right about the arrangement of the lines in the original draft, l.2 would have been a little shorter than l.1, which the addition of B would have brought it up to the same length. Since B cannot be as old as A but seems to be of the same time as D, and since it would not seem likely that the establishment of the relic by Vijayamitra mentioned in D should be further characterised as the gift of Viyakamitra, it seems to me that I must be right in my explanation that B has been added above the date in order to make it more precise, though such an addition was not necessary. It is not, of course, possible to speak with full confidence, but it seems to me that the explanation I have suggested above is the only one which explains the whole arrangement. I therefore explain B, in connection with the date, as ‘ of Viyakamitra (=Vijayamitra), the unequalled king’.

The final portion of the inscription does not cause any difficulty iyo prat(r)ithavit(r)e Vijayamitrena apracharajena bhag(r)avalu Śakimuṇisa samasabudhasa śarira ‘ this relic of the Lord Śākyamuni, the perfectly enlightened one, was established by the unequalled king Vijayamitra’.

There is, finally, a short inscription, Majumdar’s E, on the bottom of the casket. Majumdar read viśipilena aṇaṁkatena likhit(r)e explaining aṇaṁkatena as corresponding to ājñākṛitēna ‘ who was ordered’. An examination of the not infrequent ye in D shows, however, that we must read aṇaṁkayena, not to mention the evident difficulty in assuming kata and not kat(r)a in this record. The cerebral ṇ side by side with the dental in aṇaṁkayena further shows that I was probably right in thinking that ṇ and n are used promiscuously in our inscription.

We must then translate ‘ written by Viśpila’ the aṇaṁkaya, and as I have remarked in another place,1aṇaṁkaya can hardly be anything else than the Greek ‘ (Symbol), which was used in Hellenistic times about a ruler’s advisers. And we are reminded of the fact that another Greek term μεριδάϙfης has been traced by Professor F. W. Thomas2 in the neighbourhood, and from a somewhat earlier time.

The writer Viśpila was as his name shows, no Greek, but an Iranian, probably a Parthian. And the ruler Vijayamitra, probably belongs to the Parthian period. But then we now know that the Parthians played a great role in the preservation and evolution of Greek notions and especially of Greek art in the Indian borderland.

___________________________

^[1]J. R. A. S., 1939, p. 265.
^[2]Festschrift fur Ernst Windisch, pp.362 ff.