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POLITICAL HISTORY OF N. INDIA FROM JAIN SOURCES
and Satruñjaya in Northern India and the inscriptions found from SravanaVelgolā in Southern India belong to this class. Most of them are issued by governors of provinces, generals or ministers of states and by brothers or sons of kings in their private capacity. A good many are engraved on the image pedestals of gods or on religious buildings recording pious donations. These constitute the chief sources of fixing the dates of these images or buildings and have proved of immense help in tracing the evolution of art and religion and determining their general conditions in any specified period.
Certain separate collections of the Jain inscriptions have been published by scholars. The Prāchina Jain Lekha-sangraha by Muni Jinavijaya Ji, the Jain Lekha-sangraha in three parts published by Pūranacandra Nāhar, the Jain Silälekhasangraha in three parts published by the Manikyacandra Dig Jain Granthmālā, the Arbuda Prāchina Jain Lekha-sangraha in five parts by Muni Jayanta Vijaya Ji, the Jain Dhātupratimă Lekha-sangraha by Buddhisāgarasūri, the Prächina Lekha-sangraha by Vijayadharmasūri, the Jain Dhātu Pratima Lekha by Muni Kāntisāgar, and so many other collections deserve to be mentioned here.
On the whole, it may be said that the Jain inscriptions of our period are of great value in supplementing the sources of the ancient history of India. Some of them refer to ruling kings otherwise unknown and many of them supply dates of kings in a specified or unspecified era. They have enabled the historians to reconstruct the history of certain localities on a solid basis.
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