Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/130

 118 INSCRIPTIONS [INDIAN. and hieratic characters of Egypt, have been copied (in 1880) by Professor Robertson Smith on the rocks of Taif near Jeddah. (Compare the inscription from the neigh bourhood of El-Wijh given by Wellsted, ii. 189.) Captain Burton has also found an inscription in characters not unlike the Himyaritic, in the Wady Intaysh, with which he compares two semi-Nabathean inscriptions from Wady Unayyid copied by Dr Wallin, and an inscription at Mecca given by Dozy (The Gold Mines of Midian, 1878). The inscriptions of the Semitic Babylonians and As syrians are separately treated above. The curious Hittite hieroglyphics found of late years at Carchemish, Aleppo, Hamath, and various places in Asia Minor do not seem to conceal a Semitic language. See Fr. Lenormant, Essai sur la Propagation de T Alphabet pli&- nicien dans Tancien Monde, 1872-75 ; E. Kenan, Histoire gtnerale et Systeme compart dcs Langucs Semitiques, 1863 ; Gesenius, Scriptures Lingusequc Phceniciie Monumenta, 1837; Schroder, Die pMniziscJie Sprachc, 1869 ; Do Vogue, Melanges d Archeologie orientalc, 1868. Clermont-Gannean s work on the Moabite Stone will supersede previous monographs. (A. H. S. ) III. INDIAN. The inscriptions of India are very numerous and of great variety. They are found upon rocks, pillars, and build ings, in caves, topes, and temples, and on plates of copper. These last are grants of land made by kings for religious purposes, and they are historically valuable because they contain, not only the name of the grantor, but a more or less complete list of his predecessors. Implicit reliance cannot be placed on these documents. Vanity has some times led to the invention of an illustrious ancestry. So far back as the old lawgiver Manu, punishments were denounced upon the forgers of grants, and plates that are palpable forgeries have been discovered. The oldest and most important of the inscriptions are the religious edicts of King Piyadasi, who is styled Devdnam- piya, &quot; the beloved of the gods.&quot; Their date is clearly proved to be about 250 B.C. This Piyadasi is now by universal consent admitted to be identical with the great Maurya king Asoka, grandson of Chandra-gupta, whose identification by Sir W. Jones with Sandrakoptos or Sandracottus, the ally of Seleucus Nicator, is the corner stone of that very tottering structure, Hindu chronology. The first published inscription of Piyadasi was copied from a stone column 42 feet high, and known as the Ldt or pillar of Firoz Shah, a sultan who, about the middle of the 14th century, conveyed it to Delhi from a village in the hills about 250 miles distant, and re-erected it as an ornament to his capital. The same monarch brought from Meerut and re-erected near his palace another similar column, but this was thrown down by an explosion in the year 1719, and, although it has lately been raised again, it is so much mutilated that scarcely half of the inscription remains. A copy of the inscription on the first of these columns was published by Captain Hoare in the Asiatic Researches in 1801. It was a subject of great curiosity and speculation, but it baffled all attempts to decipher it until tho year 1837, when the acute sagacity of James Prinsep surmounted the difficulty. 1 This particular alphabet having been first
 * He found the key to it by a very happy guess. He was engaged

in copying some short inscriptions engraven upon the pillars of a temple at Sanchi, and he observed that, although each inscription was in the main different, all of them terminated with the same two letters. Knowing that devout Buddhists were in the habit of making votive offerings of pillars, rails, and ornaments to their temples, and of inscrib ing upon them a record of the gift with the name of the donor, Mr rrinsep assumed that the oft repeated two letters represented the word ddnam, &quot;gift,&quot; and this surmise proved to be correct. He thus obtained the consonants d and n, and as the name preceding the word rldnam must necessarily be in the genitive case, this fact made him discovered on and translated from a Ldt, or pillar inscrip tion, obtained the name of the &quot;Ldt alphabet,&quot; but the name &quot; Indian Pali &quot; is now generally preferred. The mystery of the alphabet being thus penetrated, the longer and more important rock inscriptions were taken in hand. Two versions were then known, one at Girnar in Kathiawar, the other discovered and copied by Kittoe at Dhauli in Orissa, at the extreme opposite side of India. Dr Wilson of Bombay and Captain Postans furnished Prinsep with copies of the former, and he collated the two versions. He then transliterated them in modern char acters, and with the help of a pandit he rendered them into English. Not long afterwards Prinsep s brilliant dis coveries were brought to a close by his untimely death in April 1840. In the year 1836 M. Court, an officer in the service of Ranjit Singh, the ruler of the Punjab, made known the existence of a rock inscription at Kapur-di-giri, west of the Indus, and not very far from Attock. Subsequent explorations show that the rock is really situated in the village of Shahbaz-garhi. No copy was obtained until October 1838, when the traveller Masson most carefully and perseveringly made a calico stampage and an eye copy. These he presented to the Royal Asiatic Society, whose acute and laborious secretary, Edwin Norris, proceeded to make a reduced copy of the calico stampage. This inscrip tion was not in the Lat character, but in that now known as the Bactrian Pali or Ariano-Pali, which bears strong indications of a Phosnician origin. The Lat alphabet or Indian Pali is written, like the character of the Sanskrit, from left to right ; the Ariano-Pali runs from right to left. This character had previously been found on the bilingual coins of the Greek kings of Bactria, the obverse of which bore a Greek legend, and the reverse had some letters which proved to be a rendering of the same in Ariano-Pali. Masson first detected the connexion between the two legends, and Prinsep following up his suggestion soon settled the value of several of the Ariano-Pali letters. Similar discoveries were made simultaneously by Lassen in Germany. The letters so discovered were available as keys for the interpretation of the Shahbaz-garhi inscription, but only as keys, for the inscription contained many dubious and unknown characters, and, unlike the alphabet of the Indian Pali, it possessed numerous compound letters. It was in the process of copying that Norris, like Prinsep, hit upon a clue. He remarked a frequently repeated group of letters, and he came to the conviction that these represented the words Devdnam-piya. He made known this opinion (J. R. A. S., viii. 303), and gave a copy of a short separate part of the inscription to a young student, afterwards Professor Dowson, who accepted the reading. Knowing that these words were the oft repeated title of Piyadasi in the Girnar inscription, Mr Dowson proceeded to make a comparison of the two and discovered their identity. The whole inscription eventually proved to be a third version of Asoka s edicts. In the year 1850 a fourth version was discovered and copied, though it was not made public, by Mr (now Sir Walter) Elliot, at Jaugarla near Ganjam in Orissa, about 50 miles south of Dhauli. Lastly, a fifth copy was discovered by Mr Forrest early in 1860, at Khalsi, west of the Jumna, about 15 miles from Masuri or Mussooree. The late Captain Chapman (J. R. A. S., xiii. 176) brought from Ceylon a copy of a small fragment of rock inscription, and in this the words Devanam-piya are distinct, but the copy was made by eye and is unintelligible. These inscriptions show the extent of Asoka s influence, if not of his direct empire. Their master of the letter s. He used this key with such ardour and success that in the course of a month he was able to make a transliteration and translation of the whole inscription.