North Indian Inscriptions

RECORDS OF THE SOMAVAMSI KINGS OF KATAK.

belong to the Sômavaṁśa or Sômakula, the Lunar Race. Their dynastic name proper has not yet come to light. But their paramount titles,─ Paramabhaṭṭâraka, Mahârâjadhirâja, and Parameśvara,─ were not the exclusive attributes of the Guptas, as Babu Rangalala Banerjea thought. And, even apart from the fact that their period is plainly too late, the termination of their names does not require us to allot them to the lineage of the Early Guptas, or even of the later Guptas of Magadha ; and there appears no reason whatever for our doing so.

......There remains for consideration the period to which these kings may be allotted. And, as their records are not dated on any era, and their names have not been met with in any other records so dated or capable of being assigned to an exact date by means of a record so dated, this question can only be dealt with approximately, on palæographic grounds. The results, however, are sufficiently definite, within certain limits.

......The characters used in these charters are Nâgarî. Partly because of the locality to which the charters belong, and partly because of certain unique forms of the vowels ê, ai, and au, which will be noticed again further on and which are radically different from any forms to be found in records from Southern and Western India, they must unquestionably be allotted to the northern class of Nâgarî alphabets. And they exhibit more or less of a tendency towards a particular type of that class of Nâgarî alphabets, to which, rightly or wrongly, the special name of Kuṭila has come to be attached.¹ A comparison of the records, one with each other, shews this peculiarity most plainly in B., C., D., and E. And characters of apparently much the same type with the present ones, as exhibited in these four records, are carried back to about the middle of the seventh century A.D. by the Aphsaḍ inscription (Behâr) of Âdityasêna (Gupta Inscriptions, p. 204, Plate). But closer inscription shews that the present characters are very much later than those of the Aphsaḍ record ; contrast, for instance, the initial â of the Aphsaḍ inscription, in âsîd, line 1, and the k, j, ṭ, m, r, and s, in kaṭakô, jayinâ, madânâdha, vidyâdhar, and sahasra in the same line, with the initial â in âkshêptâ, line 20, and the k, j, ṭ, m, r, and s, in kaṭakât, samâvâsita, vijaya, and parama, line 1, of B., and still more with the same characters as exhibited in the same words in A. lines 1 and 27. From these letters alone, it is evident that a very considerable interval must have elapsed from the period of the Aphsaḍ record to the time when these charters were engraved. And, reverting further on to a few individual letters, I will deal first with some other features which, endorsing the above result, help better to fix the approximate period of these charters. In making comparisons, I shall quote records, with published facsimiles, which come from the nearest possible localities to the part of the country to which the charters under consideration belong.

......A point which will at once attract attention, as suggestive of a certain amount of antiquity, is the of numerical symbols, for ‘three’ and ‘ten’ in E. line 65. But we are
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......¹ This name was first used by Prinsep, in 1837 (Jour. Beng. As. Soc. Vol. p. 779), on the authority of the words kuṭil-âksharâṇi vidushâ, which occur towards the end of the Dêwal inscription of the Chhinda prince Lalla. In re-editing this record, Dr. Bühler (Ep. Ind. Vol. I. p. 76) has expressed the opinion that the words mean, not that the writer was acquainted with letters called Kuṭila or ‘crooked letters,’ but that he was skilled in reading ‘badly written and difficult’ documents. I think, however, that the analogous expressions quoted by me from other records in noticing the words used in the Dêwal inscription (Gupta Inscriptions, p. 201), make it quite clear that, whatever it may actually mean, the expression refers to the characters in which that record itself is engraved. And the contrast between them (see the Plate, Ep. Ind. Vol. I. p. 76) and the far more straight, square, and plain characters of, for instance, the ‘Deopara’ inscription of Vijayasêna (ibid. p. 308, Plate), indicate that the reference must be to the type of them, the peculiarity of which perhaps consists more in the general avoidance of straight lines, than in the tails or bottom twists to the right which appear also in the ‘Deopara’ inscription and in other records in the square characters.─ As I remarked on the same occasion, the expression kuṭil-âksharâṇi does not seem to have been used in the Dêwal inscription with the object of recording a standing name of a variety of the alphabet. But the term Kuṭila fits the type of letters so well, that, as it has been in use for so long a time, there really seems no objection to continue it, as the designation of a variety of the northern Nâgarî alphabet, not as the name of a distinct alphabet.