South Indian Inscriptions

EPIGRAPHIA INDICA

No. 11─ INSCRIPTIONS OF CHANDRAS OF ARAKAN

(1 Plates)

D. C. SIRCAR, OOTACAMUND

In February 1957, the Director of the Archaeological Survey of Burma, Mandalay, kindly sent to me for examination photographic prints of two small inscriptions recently found at Vēsālī near Mrohaung in the Akyab District, Arakan. While informing him of the results of my examination of the epigraphs, I requested him to sent me a few inked impressions of the records for further study and publication. He was kind enough to comply with my request and estampages of the epigraphs reached me in March together with an impression of a third record from the same place.

The first inscription is engraved on a slab recovered from the ruins of a Stūpa on the Unhissaka hill at Vēsālī. The slab bearing the second record belongs to what is called the Ānandachandra Stūpa standing on a hill near Vēsālī. It is still in situ. The third epigraph is incised on an octagonal pillar six feet high. It belongs to a Stūpa traditionally known to have been constructed by a ruler named Sūryachandra.

The slab bearing the first inscription is stated to measure eighteen inches in length, ten inches in height and six inches in thickness. There are only five lines of writing. The lines are about thirteen inches long, although line 2 is slightly bigger owing to two letters, originally omitted through oversight, being engraved in the left margin. The highest number of letters in a line is 18 (line 2) and the smallest only 13 (line 4).

The second inscription, consisting of four lines of writing, covers an area about ten inches in length and four inches in height. The letters are slightly smaller in size than in the first epigraph. The preservation of the writing in both these records is fairly satisfactory although a few letters are damaged or rubbed off here and there. The third inscription, which is fragmentary, shows traces of six lines of writing cove ring an area about twentyfour inches in length and nine inches in height. In this inscription, only traces of a few letters in the first line remain while a number of letters in all the other lines are broken away. Some of the extant letters of the record are also worn out and difficult to decipher.

The characters of the first epigraph closely resemble those of a votive inscription in two lines on a monastery bell found at Vēsālī, which was published with an illustration by the late Prof. E. H. Johnston in the Bulleṭin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Vol. XI, 1943-46, pp. 358 ff.^[1] The alphabet of both the records has a close resemblance with that used in certain inscriptions of the fifth and sixth centuries A.D., discovered in Eastern India. There is, however, an amount of local development noticed in the palaeography of all the three epigraphs now under study. This element is just slightly exhibited by Inscription No. 1 which is the earliest of the three. It is a little more pronounced in Inscription No. 2 which is a few decades later than the first inscription, while Inscription No. 3 belonging to a still later date exhibits it in a more considerable degree than even the second epigraph.

In a careful analysis of the characters of the Vēsālī bell inscription which may be assigned on palaeographical grounds to the same age as our Inscription No. 1, Johnston observes that the date of the record ‘is shown by its forms for the letters ka and sa and its tripartite ya to be probably not later than A.D. 650’ and that ‘other indications, particularly the forms of sa and ma, suggest

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^[1] See Plate IV, figure 1.