Page:Bulandshahr- Or, Sketches of an Indian District- Social, Historical and Architectural.djvu/59

 in characters of different size, but of the same period, probably about 1200 A. D. Both are records of grants for religious purposes, and the stone must have been intended for deposit among the archives of the temple for which the endowments were provided. But it can never have been actually set up, as it is difficult to imagine a position in which both sides could be conveniently read; it is also evident that preparations had been made for splitting it up into two separate slabs of equal thickness. One of the two inscriptions opens with an invocation of Krishna, in the words Om Namo Bhagavate Vásudeváya. I have had it deposited, in the Indian Museum, Calcutta.

Of far greater significance is a copper-plate inscription, which was dug up in 1867 at the village of Mánpur, in the Agota Pargana, about eight miles to the north of the town of Bulandshahr. Natives, even of the higher and more educated classes, have a childish notion, of which it is quite impossible to disabuse them, that these old copper-plate inscriptions always refer to some buried treasure. Thus the Council of the Mahárája of Jaypur, on hearing of the Mánpur find, at once put in a claim for anything of value that might be discovered; on the plea that Mánpur had been founded by Rája Mán Siñh of the Jaypur line. The absurdity of the claim was in this case enhanced by the confusion of chronological ideas; for Mán Siñh was a contemporary of Akbar's, while the plate is anterior to the reign of Prithi Ráj. It was sent to the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, and a translation of it into Nágari and English by Pandit Pratápa Chandra Ghosh, appeared in Vol. XXXVIII of the Journal of the Calcutta Asiatic Society. By a strange fatality, the three most important words in the whole record, viz, those which give the name of the reigning family, the name of the country, and the century of the date, are the most doubtful and illegible. The year which is written at full length, in words-ends with 'thirty-three,' but the initial letters have been obliterated by rust. The century, however, must be either the eleventh or twelfth, for the characters belong to the period immediately succeeding that of the Kutila inscriptions. The date may thus be confidently accepted as either 1133 or 1233 Samvat, i. e, either 1076 or 1176 of the Christian era. The earlier of the two seems the more probable.