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EPIGRAPHIA INDICA.
[VOJ.. XXII.
No. 8.-SILAHARA CAVE INSCRIPTIONS.
By Prof. D. R. BHANDARKAR, Calcutta. The inscriptions which are edited here for the first time were found in Caves at Silahard in the Rewah State, Central India. More than twenty-five years ago a rubbing of one of these records was sent by a schoolmaster to Rai Bahadur Hiralal, the celebrated archæologist of C. P. who in his turn some time ago brought it to the notice of the Government Epigraphist, Dr. Hirananda Sastri. During the year 1927-28, the latter officer visited the caves and published an account of the same together with a summary of their inscriptions on pp. 136-8 of the Archanl. Suru. Ind., An. Rep., of the same year. The estampages which he took during his official visit to the monuments were kindly made over to me for detailed treatment, and the present paper is the result of it.
The caves at Silaharā are about sixteen miles to the north-east of Jaithāri, a station on the Katni-Bilaspur Branch of the Bengal Nagpur Railway. It lies between Latitude 23° 2' North and Longitude 81° 50' East. They are a group of four artificial caves with traces of one more excavation and are situated on the east bank of a small river called the Kēväiñ, presenting a picturesque view. The name Silaharā, as suggested by Dr. Sastri, is probably a modern form of Silāgriha which occurs as silägahā in these inscriptions. Of these four monuments, only three, namely, the Sītāmāời, the Durvāsā and the Chēri-Gõdadi-Caves are well preserved. The fourth has a hole in the roof of one of its cells. The first three caves only contain inscriptions, some of which are in the Brāhmi script, and some in the Shell 'characters. Here, we are concerned oply with the inscriptions in the Brāhmi script.
From the form of the letters all these inscriptions except one seem to belong to the first century A.D. What is palæographically worthy of note about them is that the characters p and v have occasionally flat and angular bases and that the base-line of n also is sometimes slightly curved. These peculiarities are first clearly noticeable in the cave inscriptions of Ushavadāta, which pertain to the beginning of the second century A.D. But there they appear as the permanent and not incidental forms of those letters. Moreover, besides p and v, the letters kh, gh, j and m are found in Ushavadāta's epigraphs invariably with flat and angular bases, which are not noticeable at all in our cave inscriptions. The inference is not unreasonable that our epigraphs are slightly earlier in date than those of Ushavadāta, and if the latter belong to the first quarter of the second century, we cannot be far from right if we assign the Silaharā inscriptions to about the middle of the first century A.D.
Other paleographic peculiarities also deserve to be noticed. Thus d consists of two curves, one concave and one convex, joined in one way or the other and thus giving rise to two different forms of d. Similarly, the letter t appears in two different forms. The character m in Sivawila in No.3, 1. 3, is unlike m in other places in these inscriptions, and as such is worthy of note.
These are seven inscriptions. All of them except two bear more or less the same import. They are engraved in the inner walls of the caves, the Durvāsā containing one, and the ChēriGödadi two and the Sītāmāời three. The last of these cares has one more inscription but incised on a pillar and with a different import. All these records are complete as far as they go, but the longest and most detailed of these is that engraved in the Durvāsa Cave. In the Sitāmādi Cave, however, while one inscription is complete, the other has apparently not been fully incised, supposing of course that the whole of it has been copied in the estampage before us. The object of the inscriptions is to record the excavation of caves by the amātya Maudgaliputra Müladēva of the Vatsa-gotra, while Svåmidatta was the ruler of the kingdom. Who this Svämi
