North Indian Inscriptions

RECORDS OF THE SOMAVAMSI KINGS OF KATAK.

back even a century earlier by the Dighwâ-Dubaulî grant (Bengal) of the Mahârâja Mahêndrapâla, of A.D. 761-62 (Ind. Ant. Vol. XV. p. 112, Plate ; see, for instance, maharaja, line 2, and dêvyâm=utpannaḥ, line 4). The j and ṭ, also, as presented in the Sirpur inscriptions, are much more antique than the forms which we have in the present charters. And, even if a somewhat earlier period, than that which I have arrived at, should be hereafter established for the Śivagupta and his successors of the present charters, the palæographic changes in so many details appear more than can possibly be covered by the lapse of a single generation.

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......The local annals of Orissa, mentioned in the preceding remarks, have been taken so seriously, and so much interest has been attached to the question of the identity of the Yavanas who are mentioned in them, that it is necessary to do more than simply dismiss them with only a broad statement of their general want of value, amply supported though it is in the case of Yayâti-Kêsari, and with the curt assertion, borne out though it is by at least one certain epigraphic instance, that the Yavanas are simply the Musalmâns of Northern India of the period A.D. 1001, or later, and onwards. The alleged facts and dates recited in the annals have all been accepted as history or “the mile-stones of history” by Sir William Hunter in his Orissa (see, in particular, Vol. I., edition of 1872, chapter V. p. 198 ff.), from which the leading features have been reproduced in his article on Orissa in the Imperial Gazetteer of India, Vol. X. p. 428 ff. : ¹ and, in the other matter, his conclusion was that by the name ‘Yavana’ the annuals mean the Greeks ; and his line of argument (Orissa, Vol. I. pp. 207 to 214) appears to have been,─ the Epics and Purâṇas enumerate the Yavanas in the list of foreign or non-Âryan races on the western frontier of India ; through their spirit of enterprise, which led them into various part of Asia, the Ionian Greeks became known at an early period to the Persians, of whose empire, in fact, one body of them formed a part ; the name Ionian was, thus, well known to the Persians, and came to be applied by them to the whole Greek race, the appellation was made known to the Hindûs by the Persian expedition sent by Darius to the Indus in the sixth century B.C. ; by the Hindûs, the name “Iov would be naturally transliterated by ‘Yôna’, which is the contracted form of ‘Yavana;’ from after the date of Alexander’s expendition into the Pañjâb at the close of the fourth century B.C., the term ‘Yavana,’ in Hindû literature, applies unmistakably to the Greeks ; the inroads of Alexander and Seleucus left in the Pañjab a residual element of these Greeks, which soon inevitably began to migrate southwards ;² their presence in the Gangetic valley is proved by a

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......¹ His Orissa was published twenty-two years ago. And the article on Orissa in the Imperial Gazetteer was last issued, in the second edition, eight years ago. I do not find any quotation of the alleged fact and dates of the annals of Orissa in The Indian Empire, the new and revised edition of which was issued last year,─ apparently because there was no occasion to quote details of that kind ; but the result arrived at previously appear to be endorsed up to date by the remarks (p. 220 ; in the chapter on the Greeks in India, and just after mention of the fact that the term Yavana originally applied to everal non-Brâhmaṇical races, and especially to the Greeks) that “the Orissa chroniclers called the sea-invaders from the Bay of Bengal, Yavanas, and in later times the term “was applied to the Musalmâns,”─ to which is attached a reference, in a footnote, to Orissa, Vol. I. pp. 25, 85, and 209 to 232 (ed. 1872).─ I am dealing, of course, only with the Yavanas of the annals of Orissa, who are quite distinct from the Greek-Yavanas.
......² For clear traces of Yavanas, sporadically, in Western and Southern India,─ in Kiṭhiâwâḍ, in the Nâsik District, and at Dhênukâkaṭa (Amarâvatî),─ see Ind. Ant. Vol. XXII. pp. 194, 195.─ Sir William Hunter (Orissa, Vol. I. p. 218) has quoted Dr. Bhau Daji as the authority for a list of seven Yavana princes who ruled in Central India from (it is supposed) the fifth century A.D. to about the ninth. These, however, are simply the Vâkâṭaka Mahârâjas of the Chammak and Siwanî charters (Gupta Inscriptions, pp. 235, 243) and the Ajaṇṭâ inscription (Archæol. Surv. West. Ind. Vol. IV. p. 124). The first of them was Vindhyaśakti. This person was identified by Dr. Bhau Daji with the kailakila-Yavana king Vindhyaśakti of the Vishṇu-Purâṇa (Wilson’s translation, Hall’s edition, Vol. IV. p. 210). But there are absolutely no grounds for this identification.