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No. 6.]
HIDDA INSCRIPTION OF THE YEAR 28.
No. 6.-HIDDA INSCRIPTION OF THE YEAR 28.
BY DR. STEN KONOW, OSLO. The credit for bringing this record to light belongs to Professor F. W. Thomas. In a paper contributed to the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1915, pp. 91 ff., he draws attention to sume remarks by Masson about & Kharöshthi inscription he had found at Tope No. 13 of Hidda' on an earthen jar, and which he had copied. A lithographed reproduction is found opposite p. 262 of the Ariana Antiqua.
Professor Thomas further tells us that, in going through Masson's papers in the India Office Library, he found a number of attempts at decipherment of one or two Kharðshthi inscriptions', and one of them proved to be the very record reproduced in the old publication. There were several attempts, and Professor Thomas reproduced the most careful one and published his reading of the inscription, which was subsequently, with some alterations, reproduced in my edition of the record in the Corpus, pp. 157 ff.
The copy published by Professor Thomas is far from being satisfactory, but the way in which he was able to rearrange the sequence of the letters and bring out the meaning is highly to be admired. But now new material has come to hand, which makes it possible to read the legend with greater certainty.
In a letter of the 13th December 1935, Dr. E. H. Johnston writes: 'In the course of cataloguing the Masson papers in the India Office Library, I have come across & number of copies of the inscription on the Hiddah jar........ Most date from after Masson's return to England early in 1842 and have no special value....... Three however are on blue paper; one neems to be a new working copy, written out for an attempted transliteration. The others are on two strips of paper, which Masson pasted on to another sheet of paper after his return to England.'
Fuller particulars about these last-mentioned copies were given in another letter from Dr. Johnston of the 13th January 1936: The copies are on two strips of blue foolscap, measuring 55 by 315 millimetres and 98 by 313 millimetres, respectively. I regard them as Masson's originale for various reasons. That he looked on them as particularly important is shown by the fact that he has cut them out of the particular sheet on which they were and pasted them on to another sheet; this must have been done after his return to England, as the kind of paper on to which they have been pasted shows. Masson used this blue foolacap almost exclusively in 1834 and many of his original sketches of the Topes of Hiddah and Chaharbagh are on similar paper, having been done that year (1834) at the time of excavation. The writing is done with a broader pen than he was in the habit of using. There are at least a dozen copies of this inscription among his papers, most of them made after he had left Afghanistan, and in every case except this the copy was evidently made in order to put between the lines an attempt at transliteration. No room has been left for such writing on these strips, though you will notice some remains of such an attempt at the bottom. I imagine the first strip was left incomplete after writing the first line because of the disfigurement by blots.'
With the kind permission of Dr. Randle, the Librarian of the India Office, excellent photographs of these strips have been prepared, and I have been authorized to make use of them for an eventual new edition of the record.
There cannot be any doubt that Dr. Johnston is right in considering these strips as Masson's original draft And we can also see that the incomplete strip is the first one. It has partly been corrected in the second. And we shall find several certain indications which show that the copies reproduced in the Ariana Antigua and in Professor Thomas' plate have been made from our strips.
