Page:From Constantinople to the home of Omar Khayyam.djvu/106

 44 THE OIL-FIELDS AND THE FIRE-TEMPLE OF BAKU

the inscription is high and in a position not easy for photograph- ing, it was necessary to perform the somewhat acrobatic feat of perching on the top of a long ladder that was shakily held in the air, about ten feet off, by six men. Considering the diffi- culties of the task, the photograph (the only legible one I have seen) turned out to be quite a success.

Around the walls of the precinct, either above or near the side of the doorways of the cells, are fifteen more dedicatory tablets sunk in the plaster and written, with one exception, in the same Nagari character, prevailingly used for Sanskrit, or in a variety of this Indian alphabet. In my note-book I gave them numbers, beginning at the northwest corner near the usual entrance. Two of them in the northern wall are in the Panjabi language and script of Upper India and are of Sikh origin, as they quote from the Adi Granth, the sacred book of Nanak's religion, which was founded about 1500 a.d. Their date, however, must be two centuries or more after that era, as was shown by Dr. Justin E. Abbott, of Bombay, from a couple of photographs of two other tablets in the southern wall, which I brought back after my first visit to the temple.^ One of these latter inscriptions (XII — also published previously by Colonel C. E. Stewart in JRAS. 1897, pp. 311-318) is in Nagari and bears the date * Sam vat 1802 ' = 1745 a.d. ; the other (XIII), immediately below it, is in Persian, the only one in that language, and gives the same year according to Muham- madan reckoning, Hijra ' 1158 ' = 1745 A.D.2 I have since found similar dates on still others of the tablets within the precinct. For example, one of the tablets (I) near the west- by-north corner, beginning Sri Rama sat, contains the year found. One of the northern tablets (IV) appears to have the
 * Sam vat 1770 ' = 1713 a.d., and seems to be the earliest date

1 Abbott, Indian Inscriptions on the ^ por a rendering of the Persian

Fire Temple at BaTcUy in JAOS. 29. tablet see below, p. 53, n. 2. 299-304, New Haven, 1908.

�� �