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Sir John's opinion is bound to carry great weight, and knowing how carefully he examines the facts before he judges. I should a priori be inclined to subscribe to his judgement. But he cannot be made responsible for the way in which he is quoted by Mr. Ramaprasad. So far as I can gather, there are no sculptures in the cave where the inscription of Khāravela's queen is found. It has formerly been known as the Vaikunthapuri or Svargapuri cave. Mr. R.D. Banerji, however, maintains 16 that it is in reality the upper storey of a cave with two storeys and a sidewing. In the plan printed with the Puri volume of the Bengal District Gazetteer, the whole group is called Mañcapuri'. Mr. Banerji therefore speaks of the inscription in the Mañcapuri cave, uppwer storey. But it is the lower storey that contains the sculptures, together with an inscription assigning the cave to the Aira Mahārāja, the lord of Kalinga, Mahāmeghavahana Vakadepasiri, or, according to Mr. Banerji, Kudepasiri. We do not know anything about the date of this king, but his inscription is certainly later than the Hāthīgumphā epigraph. In such circumstances I think we can safely abstract from considering the date of the Mañcapuri sculptures for the purpose of settling the chronology of Khāravela. I therefore return to the inscription itself.
I agree with Mr. Ramaprasad that Khāravela, who was not a Maurya, would not be likely to date his epigraph in the Maurya era, the less so
e rule of the Mauryas had ceased before his time. The Purānas assign 137 and the well-known Jaina stanzas 108 years to the dynasty, and it would be very extra-ordinary is a possible Maurya era had been used after the dynasty had come to an end. On the whole I think that we are entitled to assume that no royal era was used in India before the first century B.C., when the Indo-Scythian rulers introduced such a reckoning, in all probability in imitation of foreign models. I further think that Dr. Fleet was right in drawing attention to the wellknown fact that vocchinna is a technical term used by the Jainas in order to denote such texts as had been lost sight of.
With regard to the text I cannot adopt the readings suggested by my predecessors in their entirety.
The first ak şaras have usually been read pațālake, but Mr. Jayaswal gives pațāliko, which he takes together with the ensuing catare, explaining
The
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