1. Mr. Jayaswal seems to be wrong in his contention that the lines denoting the folds of the draperies were incised after the inscriptions were cut. The plate showing the relief side of the inscriptions (facing page 96) and the ink impressions appear to point to the opposite conclusion, for we can clearly see on them several letters (e.g. the last letter of A. and the second and the last of B.) of which the shafts rise up in relief above the cross-lines of the draperies, thus suggesting that the letters, being more deeply cut than the cross-lines, were incised after the latter. The accurate way in which the letters are placed upon the cross-lines also leads to the same conclusion. 2. If we accept Mr. Jayaswal's readings of the inscriptions as correct, we are at once faced by several serious linguistic difficulties. He reads A. as Bhage Achō chhōnidhīse, interpreting it as "His gracious Majesty Aja, king of the land". Here we have three masculine stems in a in the nominative case, two of which end in è and one in ō, which is manifestly impossible, Perhaps Mr. Jayaswal is mistaken in the vowel of Achō, for the ink-impressions do not confirm his reading of ō. An even greater difficulty arises in the supposed change of j to ch in the name Achō, while on the other hand the soft consonants are retained in bhage and dhise. The alteration of soft to hard consonants is characteristic of Pais'achi and Chulika-Pais'achi, which were never spoken near Patna. Mr. Jayaswal quotes two alleged examples, one from Pali and the other from an As'okan edict; but they are disputable, and even if they be admitted they are too sporadic to justify the change in the name of the king side by side with Junchanged consonants in his epithets. To escape this difficulty, it may be suggested that the king's real name is Acha, and this was afterwards sanskritized by Pauranic writers into Aja. This is conceivable; but it would be unfortunate for Mr. Jayaswal's general hypothesis, for if the statue is that of a king whose real name is Acha, it does not follow by any means that this Acha is the legendary Aja. Incidentally I may point out that Acha is a good Dravidian name, hough I cannot see any way to bring it into the inscription. Mr. Jayaswal's reading of the second inscription is open to the same objection. He wishes to read it as Sapa-khate VațaNamdi, understanding it to mean "Of complete empire, VartaNandi". He defends sapa, as a derivative from sarva, by comparing the Pali pajapati, which is more than disputable. 3. It may however be questioned whether Mr. Jayaswal's readings are quite correct. In inscription A. the characters characters seem to me to be aten; as to their interpretation I venture no opinion. The third character a is not of an early type; it is more like the a which appears about 150 B. c. (compare Bühler, Pal., Pl. II, Cols. 18-21, 24). Next comes a ch of a distinctly late type; hardly anything like it is found until the Kusbaṇas (Bühler III, col. 3ff.) and the Turfan fragments (cf. plates in Kgl. Preuss-Turfan Expeditionen: Kleinere Sanskrit -Texte, Heft 1). It is not clear to me whether a vowel ō is attached to the ch, as I have already said. The next character is chh; Mr. Jayaswal appears to have found an attached to it, of which no trace appears in the ink-impressions. The sixth character is rightly read by him as ni; but it may be added that the shape of then somewhat resembles that of the Kushanas (Bühler, III, col. 3) and the Turfan fragments. The next letter Mr. Jayaswal takes to be dhi. But no dh of this shape is to be found in any early inscription, the other hand it is remarkably like, especially the kind of v found in records of the second century B.C. (Bühler, II, cols. 20-22). The last character is certainly ke. This form of k is developed from the type with straight horizontal bar found at Bhattiprolu and belonging to about 200 B.c. or later (Bühler, II, cols. 15, 18-22), the straight bar gradually becoming curved; we have an exact parallel in the inscription on the statue of Kanishka. The here is therefore midway between the types of 200 B.C. and those of the age of Kanishka. and on Inscription B. is beset with even more difficulties. Mr. Jayaswal reads the beginning as sapa-khatë, 1 which is dialectically 1 objectionable; morcover, there is no letter at all like 8. Mr. John Allan, who has carefully studied the ink-impressions with me, suggests that instead of sapa we should read ya, and this suggestion is fully justified by the ink-impressions; but, unfortunately for Mr. Jayaswal, the ya which we would read is the ya of the Kushana period. The next two letters are apparently kha and ta (I find no trace of a vowel ē in the latter); and I may note that the kha is more like the type of Mathura (Bühler, Il, col. 20) than that of any very early record. The next is probably va, and the next seems to be ta. Then comes a character which is very instructive, nam written with a short stumpy n with the anusvāra placed directly over the shaft of the n, exactly as in the Kushana type, and like nothing else one early records. Lastly comes a d, which may or may not have a vowel i; the ink-impression is not decisive on the point. To sum up the result of this epigraphic study: the name of Aja does not appear in inscription A.; the inscription B. has indeed four syllables which may without violence be read as Pata Nandi, a name which might be sanskritized as Varta-Nandi but as the Puranas say nothing at all about a king called VartaNandi, Mr. Jayaswal's effort to identify his Vața-Namdi with the Puranic Nandivardhana must be pronounced a failure; and, the type of writing points to a Mauryan date at the earliest and probably is considerably later. . (III) Mr. Jayaswal's reply. I am beholden to Dr. V. Smith for having studied the question himself and for having brought it to the notice of European scholars. His opinion on matters of Hindu art and history is entitled to greatest weight, and I am fortunate to have his endorsement of my results on the study of the two statues. I am not a little thankful to Dr. Barnett as well who 1 I understand that he would now real saba; bat the ink-impression shows that this is quite unjustified. |