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No. 22)
SURAT PLATESOF KARKKARAJA SUVARNAVARSHA; SAKA 743.
133
No, 22.-SURAT PLATES OF KARKKARAJA SUVARNAVARSHA OF THE GUJRAT
RASHTRAKUTA BRANCH; DATED SAKA YEAR 743.
PROF. A. S. ALTEKAR, M.A., D. LITT., BENARES.
The accompanying plates of Karkka Suvarṇavarsha, which are being edited here for the first time, were referred to by the late Dr. Bhagwănlal Indraji in his Early History of Gujarät which he contributed to the Bombay Gazetteer, Volume 1, Part I. At page 125 of the above work he briefly refers to their contents but does not give any information about their findspot or the cir. cumstances in which or the person by whom they were discovered. He refers to them as the Surat plates and, therefore, presumably they were found in or near that city. But nothing definite is known about the findspot of the plates beyond what Dr. Bhagwānlal has said in the above book. I have, therefore, continued his nomenclature of the present record, though I can adduce no definite evidence to connect them with Surat. Dr. D, R. Bhandarkar, the Carmichael Professor of Ancient Indian History and Culture at the Calcutta University, very kindly handed over the plates to me for being edited in the Epigraphia Indica and I am accordingly editing them now.
The plates are three in number. Their size, which is fairly uniform, is 13.6" by 7.6". The thickness is about 0.1". The edges of the plates have been raised into rims so as to protect the writing. The plates have been strung together by means of a ring passing through a hole which is at the centre of the proper left side, about 0-7" from the edge. The ring is about 0-4" in thickness and 3.2" in diameter and its edges have been secured by means of a circular seal about 1'11" in diameter. On its counterstruck surface there is an image of Garuda, who is in human form with wings on either side. He is sitting with folded hands and crossed legs, the soles of his feet touching each other. The seal does not bear any legend.
The inscription is written on the inner side of the first and third plates and on both sides of the second. The last plate, however, has only 7 lines, whereas the fully inscribed sides have, on an average, about 18 lines. After engraving nearly half of the first plate, the engraver, it would appear, anticipated that the space at his disposal would require smaller characters and more compact lines ; in subsequent lines of the record we, therefore, find the average number of letters in each line increased from 38 to 55. This economy in space is probably responsible for the third plate having only 7 lines.
The plates are in a fairly good state of preservation; the surface has been partly damaged in a few places, but the record is perfectly legible except at the beginning of 1. 45 where the first two letters are doubtful. The surface of the plates was not dressed very carefully; as a result there are depressions some of which look like anusvāras (cf. nekā 1. 13) and some like medial vowel marks (cf. vsiddhaya l. 44). In a few cases the engraver has corrected his mistakes ; thus he has crossed out the medial a mark of kha in khadga in l. 40 and of jā in jānmānugam in l. 55, and in addition to the correction in kā in l. 51 he has crossed out the letter ryyā so as to change käryyā into karaniyā. In some cases he has also made up his omissions by supplying the omitted letter or letters either immediately below the preceding or succeeding letter (cf. ka of usishāṁka l. 27, ha of mahāsaṁyuge 1. 32, pha of phalāvāpti l. 33, ryye in sauryyêna and yā in sadājflayā 1. 39) or at the bottom of the plate (cf. arttārtti at the bottom of the first plate, and taikā sāšanadātā and kastēna sva at that of the third). A käkapada is usually, but not invariably, written to draw attention to the corrections. But the plates were not very carefully revised, and as a result, four letters inadvertently omitted in verse 25 remained to be supplied and several wrongly repeated letters, words and groups of words remained to be crossed out. (See notes to 11. 38, 43, 45, 49
