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EPIGRAPHIA INDICA.
(VOL. III.
belong to the 8ômavamia or Somakula, the Lanar Race. Their dynastio name proper has not yet come to light. But their paramount titles, - Paramabhaffáraka, Mahar@jddhirdja, and Para másvara, -- 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 in any ers, 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 palmographic grounds. The results, however, are sufficiently definite, within certain limits.
The characters used in these charters are Nagari. Partly because of the locality to which the charters belong, and partly because of certain unique forms of the vowels &, an 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 Någari alphabets. And they exhibit more or less of a tendency towards a particular type of that class of Nagari alphabets, to which, rightly or wrongly, the special name of Kutila has come to be attached. 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 Aphsad inscription (Bebêr) of Adityasens (Gupta Inscription, p. 204, Plate). But closer inspection shews that the present characters are very much later than those of the Aphsad record; contrast, for instance, the initial d of the Aphead inscription, in dsid, line 1, and the k, j, t, m, r, and s, in katako, jayind, madandha, vidyadhar, and sahasra in the same line, with the initial & in dkshéptá, line 20, and the k, j, t, 7, , and, in katakat, samdodsita, 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 Aphead 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, heip better to fix the approximate period of these charters. In making compariBone, 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 use of numerical symbols, for three' and 'ten' in E, line 65. But we are
1 This name was first used by Prinsep, in 1837 (Jour. Beng. 41. Soc. Vol. VI. p. 779), on the authority of the words loutil-dkshardni vidwand, which occur towards the end of the Dewal inscription of the Chhinda prinoo 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 soquainted with letters called Kuțila 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 lo noticing the words used in the Dewal 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, Rp. Ind. Vol. I. p. 76) and the far more stright, square, and plain characters of, for instance, the Deopara' inscription of Vijayaans (ibid. p. 308, Plate), indicates that the reference must be to the type of them, the peculiarity of which perhaps consiste more in the general avoidance of straight lines, than in the tails or bottom twists to the right which appear also in the Deopars'inscription and in other records in the square characters.-As I remarked on the same occasion, the expression kutil-dkshardni does not seem to have been used in the Dewal inscription with the object of recording a standing name of a variety of the alphabet. But the term Kutila Ats the type of letters so well, that, it has been in use for so long a time, there really seems nb objection to continue it, as the designation of a variety of the northern Nagart alphabet, not us the name of a distinct alphabet.
