Jaina Corpus of Koppala Inscriptions X rayed

Author(s): Nagarajaiah Hampa
Publisher: Ankita Pustak

Page 27

Chapter 2 KOPPAĻA THROUGH AGES
The eminence and prominence of Koppaļa, a district headquarters in Karnataka state, with a population of more than fifty thousand, and its surroundings, go back to two thousand and five hundred years. Its prolonged and opulent history takes off from the time of Asoka, the great Mauryan emperor, who ably and wisely ruled from north and south, in third cent. B.C. The town Koppa!a looks like a loving child sitting pretty on the lap of the huge rocky hillocks in close proximity. Pālkigundu, a hillock so named, which is bigger than others in size, is to the west of the town, Bahaddūru Baņdegudda to the south, Gavimatha hill range to the east, and in between stands the hillock with a fort. The huge rock boulders have been an abode of peace and penance for several centuries, and silently witnessed the wax and wane of various cultures, religion and royal dynasties.
There are a good number of lithic records, revealing the glory that is gone, singing the saga of success, heroic verse and chewing the sweet fancies of the past. Koppaļa has traversed the long span of twenty four hundred years by sitting pretty on the shoulders of history. Dalmen, of the period of stone-age, found on the Māli Mallappagudda, a hill to the west of the Pālkigundu (gundu 'the round bigboulder'), are termed as the 'Morera angadi' [the shops of the Mauryas?].
Koppala had its distinction, as early as third cent. B.C. when the emperor Asoka preferred to cause two of rock edicts here, which are referred as the Gavimatha and Pālkigundu minor rock edicts, carved out in Brāhmi script, composed in the Prākrit dialect. So far as the written documents are concerned, there is a gap of eight hundred years after the minor rock edict of Asoka. Albeit, from seventh century onwards an uninterrupted inscriptional evidence uncoil the history of Koppala, and Kannada, language and script, starts speaking loudly, never to look back. Apart from Prakrit and Kannada epigraphs, there are also Sanskrit (written in Kannada script) and Persian charters, the latter being of post-medieval period, mostly of seventeenth and eighteenth cent. In short, these lithic records provide an authentic material to re