Page:Asoka - the Buddhist Emperor of India.djvu/127

125 seven out of the ten escaped notice in the pilgrim's memoirs. It is a curious fact that he never makes the slightest allusion to Asoka's edicts, whether incised on rocks or pillars. When he does refer to an alleged inscription of Asoka in the statement that a pillar at Pâtaliputra recorded the donation of all Jambudvîpa to the Church, he is probably only retailing the gossip of local monks, who could not read the inscription and invented an interpretation. Similar fraudulent readings of old inscriptions are constantly offered by local guides; thus, for example, Shams-i—Sirâj relates that 'certain inﬁdel Hindus' interpreted the inscription on the Delhi-Topra pillar to mean that 'no one would be able to remove the obelisk from its place till there should arise in the  latter days a Muhammadan king named Sultan Fîroz.' I do not believe for a moment that Asoka ever either perpetrated the folly of professing to give away all Jambudvîpa or recorded on a monument the nonsense attributed to him. His real records are all thoroughly sensible and matter-of-fact. The reason that the Chinese pilgrim ignores them presumably must be that in his time, nine centuries after the execution of the inscriptions, nobody could read them. The alphabets current in India during the seventh century, which are well known, differ widely from those used in the time of Asoka, and the difference is quite sufficient to account for his inscriptions being regarded as illegible. By that time the true personality of the great emperor had been covered up by