Jainism Early Faith of Ashoka

Author(s): Edward Thomas
Publisher: Trubner and Company London

Page 27

BACTRIAN COINS AND INDIAN DATES.
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Macedonian months, whose importance in their bearing upon the leading era I have enlarged upon in the parallel Indo-Scythic instance immediately under review. So that, as at present advised, I hold to a preference for the Seleucidan test, which places the Indo-Scythians. in so satisfactory a position both relatively to their predecessors and successors. I have at the same time no reserve in acknowledging the many difficulties surrounding the leading question; but if we can but get a second "pied à terre," a fixed date-point, after the classical testimony to the epoch of the great Chandra Gupta, we may check the doubts and difficulties surrounding many generations both before and after any established date that we may chance to elicit from the present and more mature inquiries.
The comparative estimates by the three methods of computation immediately available stand roughly as follows :
Seleucidan · [1st Sept., 312 B.c.] B.C. 2 to A.D. 87: Vikramaditya . . [57 B.C.?] ...B.C. 48 to A.D. 41. Şaka . . [14th March, 78 A.D.3] A.D. 88 to A.D. 177.
Before taking leave of the general subject of Indian methods of defining dates, I wish to point out how much the conventional practice of the suppression of the hundreds must have impaired the ordinary continuity of record and
in the 153rd Olympiad, etc."--xii. 4. “ Seleucus cognominatus Nicator regnum Babelis, totiusque Eraki, et Chorasanæ, Indiam usque, Ab initio imperii ipsius orditur æra, quæ Alexandri audit, ea nempe qua tempora computant Syri et Hebræi.”-Bar-Hebræus, Poçocke, p. 63.
“The Jews still style it the Æra of Contracts, because they were obliged, when subject to the Syro-Macedonian princes, to express it in all their contracts and civil writings." --Gough's Seleucidæ, p. 3.
The Syriac text of the inscription at Singanfu is dated "in 1093d year of the Greeks” (A.D. 782).-A. Kircher, La Chine, p. 43; Yule, Marco Polo, vol. ü. p. 22; see also Mure's History of Greece, vol. iv. pp. 74-79.
pl The dates begin to appear on the Syro-Macedonian coins under Seleucus IV., Trésor de Numismatique, SAP=136; Mionnet, vol. v. p. 30, PAZ=137. Cleopatra and Antiochus VIII. also date their coins in the Seleucidan era. See Mionnet, vol. v. pp. 86, 87.
The Parthian coin dates commence with A.s. 1 = 280 (B.C. 31), APTE, Artemisius, and continue to a.s. 539, Trés. de Num. Rois Grecs, pp.'143-147; Lindsay, Coinage of the Parthians (Cork, 1852), pp. 175–179.
2 Luni-solar year. 8 Solar or Sidereal year. Prinsep, Useful Tables, pp. 153-7.