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OF THE HINDUS.
333
if it exists, was written about fifty or sixty years before the Christian era — but it is not clear that any such record is in existence, the fact resting on the oral testimony of the head Pontiff at Belligola: eren, if it be legible on the face of the rock, it is of questionable authenticity, as it is perfectly solitary, and no other document of like antiquity has been met with.
The MACKENZIE Collection contains many hundred Jain inscriptions. Of these the oldest record grants made by the princes of Ilomchi", a petty state in Mysore. None of them are older than the end of the minth century. Similar grants, extending through the eleventh and twelfth centuries by the VELLála Sovereigns of Mysore, are also numerous, whilst they continue with equal frequency to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, during the existence of the sovereignty of Vijayanagur. Again, at Abú, under thie patronage of the Guzerat princes, we have a number of Jain inscriptions, but the oldest of them bear's date Samvat 1245 (A. D. 1189)'; they multiply in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and are found as late as the middle of the cighteenth-and, finally, in Magadha, the scene of VARDDHAMÁNA's birth and apotheosis, the oldest inscriptions found date no further back than the beginning of the sixteenth century?.
* [See Journal R. As. Soc., III, 217, compared with Lassen, Ind. Alt., IV, 239, Note.)
Asiatic Researches, Vol. XVI, p. 317. ? Dr. HAMILTON's Description of Jain Temples in Behár.
