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 298 EPIGRAPHIA INDICA. Vol. VIII. the first and third feet of the first line consisted, not of fire, but of six vidirds, aKhomgh, as regards the third foot, it might be urged that the lengthening influence of the initial bhr was removed by the caesura standing between cha and bhratarehi. Moreover, neither the choice nor the order of the words are snob as to suggest the text to be anything but plain prose. Considering these facts, Mr. Thomas' suggestion, ingenious- as it is, cannot be called certain, and until the metre assumed by him should turn up elsewhere, I should prefer to treat the record as written in prose.

These plates were discovered at Soraikk&vur near Kuttalam, a station on the South Indian Railway in the Tan j ore district. Mr. 0. N. Appasvami Ayyar of Tanjore was kind enough to obtain for me the original plates themselves, and I have copied the inscription direct therefrom. The inscription is engraved on three copper-plates, held together by a ring which had already been cut when it came into my hands, The plates are about 6f " long, 4" broad, and 7 V thick. The ring is 1" in diameter, and the whole set weighs 16 f ozs. with the ring, which alone weighs f oz. The rims of the plates are neither raised nor shaped thicker. The plates are numbered in Tamil numerals engraved at the top of the front side of each. The writing is deep and distinct, and barring slight damage to the front side of the first plate and the second side of the last one — the two exposed sides-r- the inscription is in proper preservation ; nor is there much difficulty in supplying the lost portions. The inscription consists of twelve Sanskrit verses which give the genealogy of prince Virupaksha, a passage in Tamil prose (lines 39-150) detailing the apportionment of the shares of land granted among the donees, and the customary benedictory and imprecatory verses Jn Sanskrit. Following the above, and at the very end, there appears a solitary verse in Sanskrit, once again mentioning the name and the parentage of the donor. With the exception of the colophon, which consists of the naine of the god Srl-Harihara and is in Kanarese characters, the alphabet of the Sanskrit verses is Grantha. The prose passage is in Tamil characters occasionally interspersed with Grantha ones. It deserves to be mentioned that, as in other Tamil inscriptions of the age to which the plates belong, there is little difference between r and the secondary form of d; the secondary d, e } o, at and au are very frequently broken up, the first symbol of them standing at the end of a line and the rest at the beginning of the next line, or again the first symbol and the consonant being placed at the end of a line and the second symbol beginning a new line, and so on ; e.g. syd in line 23, bhd in line 115, hyd in line 116, vd in line 132, md in line 138, bd in line 146 ; dS in line 15, nS in line 28 ; ko in line 129 ; rat in line 53, feat in line 128 ; dhau in line 18, dau in line 164. In line 70 the lu of padindluhku is engraved below the line ; in line 57 the letter hu is corrected into the symbol of the secondary d ; and in line 26 vdsari is written as pdsarS. The Grantha letter t is used for the Tamil 4 ia the words ufpafa and Ai occurring in lines 68, 121 and 138. The inscription belongs to the time of Virupaksha (v. 5) or Vlra-Viruppanna-TTdaiyar (1. 43 f.), the son of Harihara (II.) (v. 4) or Vlra-Harihararaya (1. 42) of the first Vijayana- gara dynasty, and records the grant of the village of fliraikkavur (v. 10, 11. 53 f. and 60 f.) together with lOf vSU$ l of land adjoining it, under the name of Vijayasudarianapjiram, to 1 In the Tamil portion this is given aa 10| vilis (11. 52 f and 67 f .). Digitized by ;le I