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No. 26.]
SILIMPUR STONE-SLAB INSCRIPTION.
No. 26.-SILIMPUR STONE-SLAB INSCRIPTION OF THE TIME OF
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JAYAPALA-DEVA.
BY RADHA GOVINDA BASAK, M.A.; RAJSHAHI.
The slab of black stone which bears this inscription was discovered in 1319 B.S. in Mauză Silimpur, Police Station Khethal, in the Bogra District of the Rajshahi Division in the Presidency of Bengal. It was found by a peasant who was levelling ground for the purpose of cultivation in the Zamindari of Babu Vijaya Govinda Basu Chowdhuri of the village Khalsi in the Manikganj Subdivision of the District of Dacca, two cubits under the surface of the earth. The place where it was unearthed and its surroundings are still full of ruins of temples, buildings, large tanks, etc., belonging to the medieval ages. After its discovery the stone remained in the possession of the Muhammadan cultivator; but in the month of Magh 1321 B.S. [January-February, 1915] some of Vijaya Babu's officers went to Silimpar on business, and possessed themselves of the inscribed slab, although the illiterate cultivator was at first most unwilling to part with it. It was then removed to Khalsi in Manikganj, whence I received information of this discovery from my friends, Baba Birendra Kumar Sarkar, B.A., and Babu Sitinath Ghosh, B.A., teachers of the Manikganj High School. I then went to Manikganj to have a sight of the inscribed slab. Vijaya Babu's men then made a present of the stone to the Varendra Research Society, and I accepted it on behalf of the Society. The slab is now deposited in the Museum of the Society at Rajshahi. I edit the inscription, for the first time, from the original slab, which was placed at my disposal by the Society.
The inscription contains 25 lines of writing, which cover a space of 1' 43" broad by 84" high. The writing is very beautifully and carefully executed. The letters are incised very deep. With the exception of a few letters in lines 5-7, which have become slightly effaced, and of three letters only, two in line 1 and one in line 24, which have been partly broken, the whole inscription is in an excellent state of preservation. From the fact that the slab has a projection of about an inch on both sides like two wings, it seems probable that it had been built into a wall of the temple which is stated to have been erected by the person eulogised in the prasasti. A most interesting feature of this inscription is that it is almost free from spelling mistakes, due either to the ignorance of the scribe or the engraver, which are so common in other stones and copper-plates found in Bengal and other parts of India. The text itself contains a verse (v. 29) which gives high praise to the scrupulous care of the engraver Somesvara, a Magadhan artist. The size of the letters is about ".
The characters in which the inscription is written belong to a variety of the Northern alphabet which was used, especially in Bengal and Magadha, in the 11th century A.D. On comparing each individual character of our inscription with that of the two stone-inscriptions1 written in the 15th year of king Nayapala-dova's reign, it has been found that the script is almost exactly the same everywhere. Some difficulty has occasionally been felt in deciphering the text on account of the close resemblance of the signs for some pairs of letters-e.g. the signs for pa and ya, ta and bha, and the subscript u and subscript r. The distinction between the forms
In my examination of the script of these two inscriptions I have used the facsimile of the Krishnadvärikä temple inscription, which was presented to the Varendra Research Society by Babu Rakbal Das Banerjee M.A., and Mr. Prabhat Kumar Mukherjee, Barrister-at-Law, and the copy of the facsimile of the Narasinha-deva temple inscription, published opposite p. 234 of the Bengali History of Bengal, by Rakhal Babu. I also got an opportunity, in this connection, to compare the letters of the Palm-leaf MSS. of the Ashta-sähasrika Prajñāpāramita (Cambridge University collection) written in the 14th year of Naya-pala, from the reprint of a pago published in Rakhal Babu's book (opposite p. 234). Much likeness is also observed between this script and that of the Sarnath inscription of Kumara-devi-(Ep. Ind., Vol. IX, plate opposite p. 324).
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