Indian Antiquary Vol 21

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 36

THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
(FEBRUARY, 1892.
Besides these five connected portions, there appear to be a few detached leaves, quite mconnected with one another ard with those larger portions.
of the fourth and fifth portions no specimens have been published, but the fifth is writtet in the same style as the first portion. The fourth portion is written in an exceedingly slovenly and hurried hand, much resembling that of the third portion, but the writing is far more slovenly. It may possibly represent the handwriting of a fourth scribe; tbongh, on the whole, I am disposed to believe that there are really only three distinct styles of writing represented in the entire manuscript. The first is that of the first and fifth portions (A and E); they are Bo nearly alike, that I believe them to be of the same scribe. The second is that of the second portion (B), which is a fine, ornamental writing. It must be ascribed to a distinct scribe. The third is that of the third and fourth portions (C and D), which seem to me to differ more in the manner than in the character of writing, and may not improbably be due to one scribe, though a different person from the scribes of A, E and B.
I come now to the question of the age of the MS. Here the first points to be settled are the locality and class, to which the characters of the MS. belong. Mr. Fleet has clearly shown, in his Volume III. of the Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum on the Gupta Inscriptions, that, irrespective of varieties, there existed, at the time of the Gupta period, two very distinct classes of the ancient Nagari alphabet, the North Indian and the South Indian (see Fleet, pp. 3, 4). The test letter for these two great classes is the character for m, which in the Southern alphabete retains its old form rosembling the figure 8, while in the Northern alpbabets that old form has been displaced by a square cursive form 9. Tried by this test, it is at once seen that the alphabet of our MS. belongs to the Northern class. Throngbout the MS, the square formy is used exclusively. It is particularly distinct in the portions Cand D; in A, B and E the left-hand curved line is drawn somewhat straighter.
The Northern class of alphabets, however, is again divided into two great sections, which, though their areas overlap to a certain extent, may be broadly, and for practical purposes sufficiently, distinguished as the Eastern and Western sections. The test letter in this case is the cerebral sibilant sha. In the North-Eastern alphabet its form is , while in the North-Western alphabet its form is u. Examples of the former alphabet we have in the posthumous Allababad pillar inscription of Samudra Gupta, of about 400 A. D. (Fleet, pp. 1, 6), the Kahâum pillar inscription of Skanda Gupta, of 460 A. D. (Fleet, p. 65), and others in Mr. Fleet's volume. The same alphabet is shown to perfection in the Nepalese inscriptions, Bhagwanlal Indraji's Nos. 1 to 10 and No. 12, published ante, Vol. IX., p. 163; also in the Nepalese inscriptions Nos. 1 and 2, in Mr. Bendall's Journey in Nepal, pp. 72, 74. To this section also belongs a new copperplate of Dharmaditya (Samudra Gupta ?), lately found in the Faridpur district in Eastern Bengal. On the other hand, the other Nepalese inscriptions, ante, Vol. IX., Nos. 11, 13, 14, 15, and in Mr. Bendall's Journey, Nos. 3 to 6, exhibit the North-Western alphabet. The latter alphabet is also to be seen in all the Nepalese MSS., described in Mr. Bendall's Catalogue of Buddhist Sanskrit MSS., including the two oldest, Nos. 1049 and 1702.
Examples of the North-Western alphabet in Mr. Fleet's volume are the Bilsad pillar ingcription of Kumara Gupta I., of 415 A. D., the Indôr plate of Skanda Gupta, of 465 A. D., and others. Also the Tôramana inscription in the Epigraphia Indica, Vol. I, p. 288, the
• All subsequent references to "Fleet" refer to this work.
. At the same time the Indian N.-E. alphabet has the form of for the dental sa, the two forms of sha and sa being bat slightly distinct from one another. The Indian N.-W. alphabet has for sa, which is also used by the Nepalese variety of the N.-E. alphabet.
The following Nos. in Mr. Fleet's volume belong to the N.-E. class : Nos. 1, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 15, 82, 64, 66, 68, 68, 75; occasionally the Western form is used in conjuncts, such as kaha, shta.
The following Nos. belong to this class : Nos. 4, 10, 13, 16, 19, 20-31, 88–37, 42, 43, 46-52, 57-59, 63, 67, 7072, 74, 76, 80. See also the classificatory lista at the end of this paper.