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No. 32]
SOME BRAHMI INSCRIPTIONS
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site by the Department of Archaeology since 1954 have yielded a large number of new inscriptions which have been mostly noticed in the Indian Archaeology--A Review and Annual Reports on Indian Epigraphy and only a few of them have been properly edited.. Four fragmentary inscriptions of the Iskhvāku age, discovered at the earlier stage of these excavations and noticed in the Annual Report on Indian Epigraphy, 1954-55, Nos. B 7-10, are edited in the following pages.3 .
The palæography of the second of these four epigraphs may appear to be slightly earlier than the Nagarjunikonda inscriptions of the time of the Ikshvaku king Virapurushadatta (about the third quarter of the third century A.D.) and his successors, as their characters do not exhibit the ornamental flourish of the upward and downward strokes of certain letters and some of the vowel marks attached to them, which are characteristic of the records of the time of those rulers. But this is not a valid conclusion as we have a few records of the time of the Iksh vāku kings exhibiting characters in which the ornamental flourish is not pronounced. The third and fourth of the four inscriptions exhibit the ornamental flourish of the upward and downward strokes in the aksharas. The language of the records is Prakrit. Their orthography resembles that of other Prakrit inscriptions discovered at Nagarjunikonda.
The first of the four inscriptions referred to above contains traces only of two lines of writing. But the upper, left and right sides of the record are broken away and lost. The first line contains the aksharas (ma) da bha (da na). There seems to be a reference here to Paramada-bhadu (Sanskrit Peramadi-bhata) occurring in Inscription No. 2 discussed below and meaning 'a soldier [fighting under the leadership of Peramadi'. The second and last of the lines ends in the expression (ohhā]yam(yā)-thambho with which the epigraph also ends. There is no doubt that the inscription was meant to record the installation of a chhāyā-stambha, i.e. '[memorial] pillar bearing the image (chhāyā) [of the person in whose memory it was raised],' probably of certain soldiers (bhadanaSanskrit bhatānāṁ) who belonged to a contingent led by a commander named Peramadi and lost their lives in a battle. The composition of the record reminds us of that of Inscription No. 2 while another Nāgārjunikonda inscription likewise ends with a reference to a chhāyā-stambha."
The second record is also a fragment of the type of the first, although it is a slightly bigger piece. It exhibits traces of six lines of writing which reads as follows:
1 . . [ga]rapa-vathavasa kula-puta[sa] 2 [Mał]rabāna Rājamisiri-kula[ka sa] 3 Damasama[kajaa p[u]ta-[Si]4 sa[ba]sa Peramadi-bhada[se]
5 paditasa chhāy[á]-tham[bho] [i*) 1 Indian Archaeology--A Review, 1954-58, pp. 22 ff. ; 1955-56, pp. 23' ff.; 1966-67, pp. 35 ff.; 1967-58, pp. 6 ff. ; 1958-59, pp. 5 ff.; A. R. Bp., 1954-55, Nos. B 7-10 ; 1955-56, Nos, 7-9; 1966-67, No.B 26-35 ; 1957-58, Nos. B 4-7.
See above, Vol. XXXIII pp. 147 ff. ; 247 ff. ; Vol. XXXIV, pp. 17 ff., and pp. 197 ff. cf. also ibid., Vol. XXXIII, pp. 189 ff.
• Sometime ago, I published these inscriptions in the Nagarjunikonda Souvenir, edited by M. Rama Rao, Pp. 41-45. A comparison of the treatment of the records in that article of mine and the improvement made in the presont paper would clearly demonstrate the difficult nature of epigraphical research so little understood in our country. The inscriptions are such that further studies may lead to mord improvement.
Of. above, Vol. XXI, Platon of M-4, M-12, M-18 ; Vol. XXIX, Plate facing p. 189. . Ibid., Vol. XXXIV, p. 28; for a number of records of this type, son below, Vol. XXXV, pp. 13-17. • This line seems to have no lotters lost at the beginning.
