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No. 5.]
HARAHA INSCRIPTION OF ISANAVARMAN.
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Siva tömple and had it rebuilt, making it much higher than it was originally and white like the moon, and that he gave it the name of Kshēmēdvara (i.e., the Lord of bliss).
The name of Suryavarman is new to the list of Mau khari princes known up to this time. Wbether he was the beir or had any claims to the throne, our inscription does not bay. From the description, however, which is given in 11. 17-19 it clearly follows that he was an accomplished son of Isānavarman. According to the Astrgash copper seals inscription, which makes no mention of Suryavarman, fś@navarman was snoceeded by Sarvavarman. 'The coins of both of these rulers, namely, Isāpavarman and Sarvavarman, are known to 19.3 Bat no coin bearing the name of Suryavarman has yet come to light. The reading of the dames Süryavarman and Sarvavarman is indisputable; for the lettering is clear both in the inscriptions aud the coins. Therefore Suryavarman must have predeceased his father, if he was not one of the raja-kumāras or princes janidr to the heir-apparent. Or could he have been a rival of Sarvavarman ?
This inscription does not supply any geographical data, and it is impossible to say what part or parts of the country the rulers whom it describes held or governed. But it gives them the distinctive opithet of Mukhara, which in Sanskrit is used in different meanings. Why they were so called is not known with certainty. But according to Kaiyata and also Vamana, the two famous oxpositors of Påņini's system of grammar, who flourished probably about the 13th and the 7th century A.D. respectively, the term is a patronymio sigoifying the descendants of Mukhara, who must have been the adipurusha or the first to bring his family into prominence and thereby caused it to be known after his name. Whether Mukhara was a proper or an attributive name, we have no means of ascertaining. But it will not be unreasonable to assume that it was a surname and that the man was so called for his being a leader' or for his fighting in the forefront of the armies which he led into action, as it is such characteristics only which would go to make a man the founder of a line. That Mukhara was a personage of such a distinction is evidenced by Båņa, who in the following statement clearly places him at the head of a family.
"Soon Gambhira, a wise Brahman attached to the king, said to Grahavarman, My son, by obtaining you Rajyabrı has at length united the two brilliant lines of Pushpabhäti and Mukbara, whose worth, like that of the Sun and Moon houses, is sung by all the world to the gratification of wise men's ears.'"
As Pushpabhäti was an ancestor of Harsha, the well-known king of Sthänvisvara, the Mukhara in all probability was ancestor of Grahavarman, the ruler of Kanyakubja. He is not indeed mentioned in the inscriptions that have yet come to light; bat possibly it is because of his being a remote ancestor.
The anthor of the prasasti appears to connect this dynasty with the Solar race. He says that the Mukharas or Maukharis were the descendants of the hundred sons whom A$vapati obtained from Vaivasvata, or the seventh Manu, who is supposed to be born of the Sun and to preside over the present age. The name Aśvapati is applied to many individuals, of whom the king of Madra and father of Savitri, the well-known heroine of an episode of the Mabābhārata, is very familiar. If that was the person whom the author of the composition had in view, the Mukharas, according to the tradition which was evidently current at the time when it was written, must have originally belonged to the north-western part of India, where Var hamihira has located the Madras.
1 This is inferred from the pan on the word satan akari in the 20th stansa. Fleet, Corp. Inaop. Ind., Vol. III, pp. 219.
Mr. B. Burn, Jow. E. 4. 8., 1906, pp. 488 8. • Cowell and Thomas, translation of the Harpbacbarita, p. 128.
Brihat-salita, 14, 22.
