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कहाऊँ स्तम्भ एवं क्षेत्रीय पुरातत्व की खोज Accepting the above arguments as correct, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that Skanda Gupta was a reigning sovereign when the Kuháon monument was put up, i. e. in the month of Jaishthya following the year 141, or the second month of 142; and as he could not under any human probability extend his reign to one hundred and forty-six years, the conclusion becomes inevitable that the year of his reign refers to some, at the time, well-known era which needed no special specification. To say that the eras of the Kuháon and the Indor monuments are different, and that consequently the one hundred and forty-one years of the former was calculated from a different starting point to that of the latter, would be a mere assertion quite unsupported by proof, and opposed to every legitimate argument.
According to Abú Raihan the Gupta-kála reckons from the years 241 of the saka era = A. C. 319, and if this could be accepted as correct, and we could assume that the era fo the inscription under notice was the Gupta-kála, its date would be A. C. 465; but as Abú Raihán's statement as preserved for us is hopelessly corrupt, and there is not a scintilla of proof to show that the Guptas used the so-called Gupta era, this assumption cannot be taken for granted. I am not disposed to reject altogether the statement of Abú Raihán, for however corrupt the passage, the fact of the Gupta and the Ballabhi eras being the same may be correct. Seeing that the Gupta era was current only over a small area in the Western Presidency, and that during the supremacy of the Ballabhi kings, the idea strikes me that the Ballabhi kings, having expelled the Guptas from Gujarát, started an era to commemorate the event, just as Sakáditya had done two hundred and forty-one years be
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