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No. 39-SOME INSCRIPTIONS FROM U.P.
(4 Plates) D. C. SIROAR, OOTACAMUND
(Received on 10.12.1959) In October 1959, I copied a number of small inscriptions in several areas of U. P. A few of them reveal the existence of a hitherto unknown ruler or indicate the extension of the territory of a little-known king. But the majority of the inscriptions, especially those copied by me at Sondhia in the Allahabad District and Jāgēsvar in the Almora District, are pilgrims' records of the type of the epigraphs at Dēvaprayāg in the Tehri Garhwal District of U. P., which were edited sometime ago in the pages of this journal. Some of the inscriptions I copied are published in this article.
In connection with the pilgrims' records included in the present paper, it may be pointed out that they are all later than the Dēvaprayag inscriptions, although we do not fully agree with the learned editor's views regarding the date of the latter. He assigns the Dēvaprayag inscriptions to 'a period ranging from the 2nd to the 5th century A.D.'. But it appears to us that none of those records can be assigned to a date much earlier than the fourth century A.D. Some of the records exhibit letters with the top mātrā of the hollow triangle type and they may be later than the fifth century. As regards the palaeography of the Dēvaprayāg inscriptions, he further observes,"According to J. F. Fleet, the script represented in all these inscriptions will be
a variety, with sourthern characteristics, of the Central Indian alphabet' of about the 4th century A.D. The letters m, s and here are throughout of the so-called southern type. Since these inscriptions are in the north, we need not call the script as peculiar to Central India alone." We find it difficult to agree with these views also. In the first place, all the published Dēvaprayag records do not apear to exhibit the characteristics of the Central India alphabet. Secondly, such records found at various places of pilgrimage were generally incised by pilgrims coming from & distance. Although pilgrimage to holy places appears to have been a non-Aryan custom gradually adopted by the Indo-Aryans, there is no doubt that it was very popular at least since the 3rd century B. C. when the Maurya emperor Aboka of Pāțaliputra (near modern Patna) is known to have visited different Buddhist holy places such as Sambodhi or Bodhgayā in the Gaya District of Bihar and Lumbini-grāma and Kanakamuni's stūpa in the Nepalese Tarai.' In the first quarter of the second century A. D., the Hinduised Saka chief Rishabhadatta of Northern Mahārāshtra is likewise known to have visited a number of pilgrim spots in Western India including Prabhāsa in Kathiawar and Pushkara near Ajmer in Rajasthan. In the fifth century A. D., an inhabitant of the Dinajpur region of North Bengal seems to have visited the temple of the Boar incarnation
1 Above, Vol. XXX, pp. 133-35, and Plates.
The editor draws our attention to the tripartite form of subscript y in one of his epigraphs (No. 18). But the same sign occurs in South Indian Middle Brahmt records, one of which he has himself assigned to the 3rd or 4th century A. D.' (above, Vol. XXXIII, p. 147 and Plate between pp. 148 and 149). His suggestion that Skandadatta mentioned in Nos. 14 and 18 is the name of two different persons and that the two records are separated by an intervening period of several centuries does not appear to be correct. As will be seen from our inscrip tions, often the same person got his name incised at more places than one.
CIT, Vol. III, p. 18. . See my Studies in the Geography of Ancient and Medieval India, p. 178, noto 1, and p. 229. . . Select Inscriptions, pp. 28470-71. • Ibid., pp. 160 f.)
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