________________
DECEMBER, 1889.)
KOMÄRKLINGAM GRANT- OF RAVIDATTA.
863
(with g, not gh) for sikha in singavermma, line 7, and the use of b for v in bbasudha, line 33, are in themselves almost sufficient to prove that the record belongs by no means to the early period to which it has been assigned by Mr. Rice.
The inscription parports to be the charter of a grant made by a raler named Ravidatta, while his victorious camp was at a town the name of which is Kitthipura as it stands in the text, but was probably intended to be Kirtipura. It is non-sectarian; the object of it being only to record the grant of some villages to some Brahmaņs.
As regards the date, the grant purports to have been made on Sunday, the new-moon day of the month Phálguna, under the Rêvati nakshatra, and on the occasion of an eclipse of the gan. But no reference is made to any era; and Ravidatta is not known from any other record. Consequently, the details cannot be tested by calculation.
Of the places mentioned in addition to Kitthipura or Kirtipura, the first village is Pungisoge, which is defined as being in the east-central desa in the Kudugur nadu in the Punnadu vishaya. The other villages granted are Kolur, Kodamaky, Dvatogeyanar, Tanagundur, and Pattal. And the village of Elagovanar is mentioned in the specification of bonndaries. All of these names remain to be identified. Mr. Rice (ante, Vol. XII. p. 13) has suggested that Punnadu appears as Pannata and Pannuta in Lassen and Yule's maps of Ancient India, and has added his opinion as to its modern representative. As indicated by him, the Punnadu vishaye of this record is doubtless identical with the Pûnada district, supposed to be a Tenthonsand district, which is mentioned in the Merkara grant (ante, Vol. I. p. 365, and Mysore Inscriptions, p. 283). And the statement in line 30 of the present record, that the witnesses were the subjects of the Ninety-six-thousand vishaya, shews that the Pannada vishaya was & sub-division of the well-known Gangevadi Ninety-six-thousand. But it is difficult to follow his further identification of the Pûnadu Ten-thousand (P) with "the Padinad or Ten Nad country,"mentioned in the Yolandur inscription of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries A.D. (Mysore Inscriptions, p. 334 ff.), which he has located in the south-east of Maisûr (id. p. xliii.), and the name of which, he tells us, "survives in the existing Hadinadu, now corrupted into Hadinara, a village on the Kabbani river, not far from its junction with the Kävêri." Hadinâra (hadin-aru), if this is exactly the right spelling of the name, means 'sixteen.' And there are the following objections to Mr. Rice's identification. In the first place, it is at least extremely doubtful whether the d of nádu can change, or even can be corrupted, intor in Hadinâru, except in the preparation of an English map by someone who would confuse the two sounds. Secondly, though the syllables hadi, or padi in the older stage of the language, do mean 'ten' in hadi-múru, 'thirteen,' and in hadi-nálku, 'fourteen,' get, as the second part of the word is not a numeral, it is not easy to see how they can be used in that sense in such a name as Hadinidu or Padinada; assuming again that this is exactly the right spelling, and that the second syllable is really di, not di. And, thirdly, it is still more difficult to imagine how the first two syllables of Padinada came to be substituted for the pun or pt of Pannida or Pûnada. The identification seeme really to be based apon the supposition that each division of "the Padinad or Ten Nad country" contained one thousand villages, in support of which there is, at any rate. nothing in the Yolandur inscription; and upon the view that the Pûnadu vishaya was a Tenthousand district. This letter point reste upon the opinion, held by Dr. Burnell (South-Ind. Paleo. p. 67), that in the Merkara grant, line 18, a certain akshara, which stands between the words Pånddu and sahasra (sic), is the namerical symbol for 'ten.' But the form of the akshara as given in Dr. Barnell's book, differs essentially from the form that it has in the lithograph of the grant (ante, Vol. I. p. 362). Nor, as it stands in the lithograph, does the akshara really resemble closely any of the known forms of the symbol for 'ten.' As it stands, it distinctly reads as chhd. Withont, at any rate, an inspoction of the original plate, I will not venture to say what it may mean. Bat, because it does not agree with the known forms of the symbol for *ten,' and because the use of a numerical symbol at all is so unlikely in the period to which the Merkara plates really belong, and still more because the use of a numerical symbol as part of a compound, with a fully written word on each side of it, is so very extraordinary that without
