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74
THE EARLY FAITH OF AŞOKA.
interfere with Mr. Vaux's more comprehensive description of Sir B. Frere's selections from the great Peshawar find—which we may hope shortly to see in the pages of our Journal; and secondly, because I wish to await General Cunningham's mature report upon the same trouvaille, which is designed to form an article in the Numismata Orientalia, a work in which I am much interested. The only portions of the full number of 524 coins that I have examined are confined to the 93 specimens Sir E. C. Bayley has forwarded to me for the purpose of study and for eventual deposit in the British Museum, and the 60 coins from the same source brought bome by Sir Bartle Frere, now in the Library at the India Office.
Nevertheless, there are some suggestive identifications embodied in the Table for which I may be held more immediately responsible, and which I must, as far as may be, endeavour to substantiate.
I. VEDIC GODS.
The first, and most venturesome of these, is the association of the wpon on the coins with the Vedic Varuņa; but the process of reasoning involved becomes more simple, when we have to admit that Oủpåvós and Varuņa are identical under independent developments from one and the same Aryan conception—and that, even if exception should be taken to the elected transcription of pon, the manifestly imperfect rendering of the letters of the Greek legend freely admits of the alternative Ωρον.
Some difficulty has been felt, throughout the arrangement of the Table, as to under which of the first four headings certain names should be placed; in this instance, I have been led to put Varuņa in the Vedic column, on account of the absence of the final Zend o-- which would have associated the name more directly with the Iranian branch of worship.
A similar reason might properly be urged for removing 1 Muir, Sanskrit Texts, vol. v. pp. 58, 72, 76, 120, etc.; Haug, Sacred Writings of the Parsees, pp. 226, 230.
