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Shri Mahavir Jain Aradhana Kendra
www.kobatirth.org
Acharya Shri Kailassagarsuri Gyanmandir
NOTES
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be a pre-Asokan king. It is impossible to regard Khāravela as a preAsokan king in the face of these two facts : (1) that his inscription in the Hāthi-Gumphā distinctly represents him as a contemporary and rival of Satakarņi, whose territories lay contiguous to the western border of his Kalinga kingdom (I. 3), and (2) that whatever the actual date and identification of this Satakarni, he was undoubtedly one of the Andhrabbstya Sātavāhana kings who rose into power on the decline of the power of the earlier Andhra kings and years after the reign of King Asoka. It is equally impossible to regard Kbāra vela as a pre-Asokan and not as a postAsokan king in view of the fact that his inscription distinctly alludes to Bahasatimita (Bșhaspatimitra) as a contemporary king of Magadha, subdued by him in the twelfth year of his reign, while there is neither tradition nor inscriptional evidence as to Bahasatimita's rule in Magadha before or immediately after Asoka's reign.
If our interpretation of the two expressions, tatiya-purisa-yuga and tatiya-yugasagávasāna, be correct, Khāravela was unquestionably the sixth king of the Mahāmeghavāhana family with whose accession to the throne of Kalinga the third couple of its two successive representative men was completed, and with whose father's death, the reign of the third couple of kings was at an end, and his son and successor Kadampa-Kudepa came, as the seventh king, to be joined with him. The records of the HathiGumpbā inscription take us as far as the fourteenth year of his reign and, by no means, beyond it, and there are neither inscriptions nor traditions to inform us who among the Mahāmegbavāhana kings and how many kings of the Mabāmeg havāhana family reigned in Kalinga as successors of Khāravela and Kadampa-Kudepa, when actually the reign of Khāravela came to an end, or what befell the Mahāmeghavābanas after Khāravela's death.
Looking back, we find that Khára vela remained an ordinary prince for fifteen and a crown-prince for nine years, which is to say, the tenor of his life as a prince and crown-prince covered full twenty-four years of the reign of the Mahāmeghavābana kings. From the foundation of the rule of the Mahāmeghavāhana dynasty right up to the accession of Khāravela we have to conceive the successive reign of (1) the first couple, (2) the first couple and a half, (3) the second couple, and (4) the second couple and a half. Even allowing twenty years as the average period of each reign, we do not get more than eighty years to represent the total length of the reign of Khāravela's predecessors in the Mabāmegbavāhana lipe.
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