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No. 28.1
SO-CALLED TAKUT-I-BAHI INSCRIPTION OF THE YEAR 103.
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other yavugas to his rule. He cannot have been quite a young man. If we assume that he was about 40 years old at the time of the Panjtar inscription, his death must have taken place between 75 and 85 A.D., and it will be seen that the establishment of the Saka era, which I ascribe to his son and successor, falls within that period. On the other hand, he can hardly have been an old man when he started on his eventful career. We know from Chinese sources that that happened after 24 A.D. We can infer, with some confidence, that he was born shortly before or shortly after the beginning of our era, and as he died an octogenarian, that would take us to the same time as I have come to above. I am unable to see how Vima Kadphises can possibly be pressed into the period between Gudufara and the establishment of the Saka era, and the theory that that reckoning was introduced by Vima Kadphises is the only explanation which is not merely based on general chronological considerations but derived from definite statements in Chinese and Indian literature, and I have not seen any serious grounds urged against it.
In such circumstances my identification of the prince (erjhana) Kapsha mentioned in l. 5 of the Gudufara inscription with Kujäla Kadphises receives considerable support. He is not distinguished by any title which would lead us to infer that he was a ruling prince. He is not even styled yavuga, but simply characterized as erjhana, 1.6., kumära. We would naturally infer that he had not yet risen to the rank of yavuga, and at all events, that his conquest of the other yarugas had not yet taken place. He may have been a young man, of say twenty years, and if he were born about the beginning of the Christian era, the date of the Gudufara inscription would correspond to c. 20 A.D.
I do not think that it is possible to arrive at more definite regults at the hand of the materials themselves, without any hypothetical interpretation of their text. I believe, however, that there is one indication in one of the ancient Kharoshthi records which may some day lead us to an absolutely certain conclusion about the initial point of the era. I refer to the word ayasa in the Taxila scroll inscription.
I have stated above that I think it impossible to explain this ayasa as the genitive of the name Aya, Azes. But then ayasa must be connected with ashadasa masasa, and the only question is why the month is characterized as aya. Aya might, of course, correspond to Sanskrit drya, and Professor Jacobi has mentioned the possibility that the month may have been called Aryan because the Indian and not the Macedonian month is mentioned. It will, .however, be seen from a comparison of the dates of the Gudufara, the Påja, the Kaldarra and the Panjtar inscriptions, that the use of the Indian and not the Macedonian names of the months was a common feature at the time when the Taxila silver scroll was inscribed. I therefore still think, as I thought when I published the record, that ayasa corresponds to Sanskrit adyasya. It should be remembered that adya does not become ajja in any Prakrit dialect, and that the change of dy to yy is attested through uyyana, Sanskrit udyāna, which is met with both in Pali and in the Shāhbázgarhi version of the Asoka edicts.
When the month Ashådha is designated as the "first" Ashādha, that does not, of course, mean that Ashādha was the first month of the year, but that there were two Ashādhas in that particular year. Can this information help us to settle the question about the precise date of the record ?
The reply would, of course, be in the negative, if we had to do with the ancient Indian calendar of the Jyotisha, according to which there was an intercalated Ashādha every five years. I have, however, already drawn attention to the fact that the calendar used in the old Kharðshthi inscriptions is not purely Indian but contains foreign, Greco-Macedonian, elements. In other
1 The difficulty becomes still greater if the Gadufars date and those of the Panjtar and Taxila records are referred to the Vikrama era.
