________________
254
EPIGRAPHIA INDICA.
[VOL. VI.
ficials have adopted the form Gudgeri." We already know one record from this place,the inscription of A.D. 1076-77, which gives its name in the Kanarese form of Gudigere and in the Sanskritised form of Dhvajatataka. An earlier mention of it is found in the Tâlgund inscription of A.D. 997,3 which mentions, as a feudatory of the Western Chalukya king Taila II., a certain Bhimarasa, with the biruda of Tailapanankakâra or "the champion of Tailapa," who was then governing the [Banavâ]si twelve-thousand, the Sâtalige thousand (the Santalige thousand of other records), the Ki[sukâ]d seventy, and an agrahara the name of which is either Samasi-Gudigere or possibly Savasi-Gudigere. The first component of this name evidently denotes the modern Sownshee' of the maps, seven miles north-west-by-north from Gudigere. The two villages thus constituted in ancient times an agrahara, which was named after both of them. And, as the Talgund record cites, among the witnesses to the matter which it registers, (the people or elders of) the padinent-agrahara, it would appear that the Samasi-Guḍigere agrahara was one of the eighteen agraharas. The present inscription is on a stone on the north side in front of a temple of Kalamêsvara at Gudigere.
4
The sketch submitted to me shews a narrow high stone, with a tall panelled head, probably about four feet high, rounded at the top. At the bottom of the outer panelling, on each side there is a full-blown water-lily; and at the bottom of the middle panel there is a large circle, with a big dot in the centre of it, standing on a square or rectangular pedestal, from each side of which there projects a floral ornamentation. Then comes the writing, immediately below the aboye, on the bottom part of the panelled head. Below the writing the stone contracts to a square face, probably about one foot square, on which there is the sculpture of an elephant, standing to the proper left, with his trunk hanging down and the tip of it turned up inwards, and, in fact, depicted very similarly to the elephant at the top of the stone at Balagâmi which contains the inscription of the time of the Western Chalukya king Vinayâditya and the Sêndraka prince Pogilli,7 and-(except that there is a band or strap round the body of the elephant) to the elephant at the top of the Peggu-ûr Ganga inscription of A.D. 978.8 Below
1 It may be remarked that the name-boards exhibited at railway stations, while large enough and clear enough, are anything but a safe guide to the actual forms of place-names, though they are likely to do more than anything else towards perpetuating certain erroneous or imperfect forms. I have seen, more than once, the same name exhibited in three different spellings on the same platform,-in one form in Kanarese characters, in another in Marathi characters, and in still another in English characters, and not one of them absolutely correct in all details.
Ind. Ant. Vol. XVIII. p. 35.
Páli, Sanskrit, and Old-Canarese Inscriptions, No. 214; and see Mysore Insers. p. 186.- Here, as in various other cases, the details given by me from the photographs of the records are not all presented in Mysore Inscriptions. No doubt, more complete and correct accounts of the contents of the records included in that book, will be given when Mr. Rice issues the volumes of the Epigraphia Carnatica which will deal with the Shimoga and Chitaldroog districts. Meanwhile, his Mysore Inscriptions still serves as an index and guide to the use of the photographs from Colonel Dixon's collection which were reproduced in my Páli, Sanskrit, and Old-Canarese Inscriptions.
He is probably described as a Mahdsdmanta; but the last four syllables cannot be read with certainty in the photograph.
The photograph seems to distinctly give the name here as Sâtalige, without any nasal after the d.
In the second syllable of the first component of the name, the original has a character, namely, the medieval form of m or of noticed on page 258 below, which in the photograph may be read either as m or as v. It is probably m. But an ink-impression is required, to settle the point definitely.
7 For a photograph, shewing the elephant, see No. 98 of Colonel Dixon's collection, reproduced as No. 152 in my P. 8. O.-C. Insers. For the bearing of the emblem on the Balagâini inscription, see page 72 above.
Eee the lithographs in Ind. Ant. Vol. VI. p. 101, and Coorg Inerrs., opposite p. 5.- There is a very similar elephant on the stone that contains the Ganga inscription at Kyatanahalli (Ep. Carn. Vol. III, Sr. 147, lithograph); where, however, it is depicted with its head raised and its back sloping. For another Ganga elephant, see the lithograph of the Tayalûr inscription (ibid., Md. 14); but that one differs from the others, in being represented as walking or running and with the tip of its trunk turned up forwards. Sir Walter Elliot has given us a representation of the elephant-seal of one or other of the spurious grants of the Ganga series, in his Coins of
