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No. 33.]
TWO COPPER-PLATE INSCRIPTIONS FROM BERAR.
213
The plates are generally in a state of good preservation. Only a few letters at the end of lines 7-14 have been completely damaged by rust and two letters, one in the beginning of line 24 and the other at the end of line 40, have been lost on account of the subsequent widening of the hole for the ring; but these can be easily supplied from cognate records. There are seventy-two lines in all, of which sixteen occur on each inscribed surface except the second side of the second and third plates which have fifteen and nine lines respectively. The letters are deeply engraved, but do not show through on the back of the plates. Their average size is 3'. The characters are of the North Indian alphabet. As we shall see below, the writer of the present record is stated to be Aruņāditya, the son of Vatsarāja, who, as stated above, was also the writer of the Sīsavai grant, but to judge from the formation of letters, the present inscription seems to have been actually written by a different person. We do not, for instance, find here any ornamentation of the mātrās such as that noted above in the case of the Sisavai plates. The formation of several letters, again, is different. The stroke for medial u is not round as in the other inscription and is added not at the lower end of the vertical stroke but a little above; see vrihad-ura- and vipula both in 1. 2. The forms of i, th (whether independent or subscript), v, $, the subscript
of the conjunct nn and the final t are considerably different from those occurring in the earlier record ; see e.g., iva (1. 10), katha (1. 16) and pratyartthino (1. 21), vinirjit- (11. 2-3), sadrißo- (1.6), karnn-ādha- (1.9) and bhräjität (1.3). R as the first member of the conjunct rya does not rise above the line but appears as a horizontal stroke to the left at the top ; see dhairya- (11. 6 and 16), om=utsärya (1. 15), etc. The language is Sanskrit and like the previous record the inscription is partly in verse and partly in prose. It shows many of the orthographical peculiarities noticed in connection with the previous record and though not altogether free from orthographical and other kinds of mistakes is, on the whole, more correctly written than the latter.
The plates were granted by the Rāshtrakūta king Govinda III, residing at Mayūra. khapdi. His genealogy, titles and birudas are identical with those in the previous record. In fact the text of the whole inscription, with the exception of the names of the donated village and its boundaries, the dütaka, the date and some minor details and with the omission of seven verses three of them being from the eulogistic portion, generally agrees with that of the Sisavai grant edited above. The object of the present inscription is to record the royal gift of the village Löhārā in the Murumba district to Bhatta Rishiyappa of the Käsyapa-gotra, who was a religious student of the Rigvēda, the son of Annamabhatta and the grandson of Bhatta Mäsõpavāsin. He is described as residing at Dhārāśiva and belonging to the community of the Traividyas of that place. The donated village was bounded on the east by the smaller Lõhārā village, on the south by two villages named Mudupa, on the west by the villages Pipparika and Mārurika and on the north also by two villages Sämaripalla and Khēda. It is also recorded that Rishiyappa, reserving 400 nivartanas of the land in the afore-mentioned village for himself, divided (the revenue of the remaining land) into 120 parts of which he assigned sixty to Madhava, Sridhara, Dödhäma, Aghakuți and others and the remaining sixty to Lokabhatta, Sridhara Dikshita, Madhuka Dvivēdin, Prithivibhatta and others. These transactions took place on the occasion of the solar eclipse on the first tithi of the bright fortnight of Mārgasirsha in the expired Saka year 734 (expressed in words only). No cyclic year is mentioned in the grant. We find that in the expired Saka year 734 there was a solar eclipse on the previous day which was the new. moon day of Kärttika. The first tithi of the bright fortnight of Mārgasirsha was current at sunrise of and therefore civilly connected with the next day, Tuesday the 9th November, A.D. 812,
1 These are vv. 7, 16 and 17 of the Staavai grant. . These were probably the smaller (laghu) and the larger (hihat) Mudape.
