South Indian Inscriptions

INCRIPTIONS OF THE KALACHURIS OF TRIPURI

The holy Ganapati. Being protected by him .....
(Line 3) Success ! (This image has been set up) by the illustrious king Karņadēva, the glorious lord of Chēdi, who honours gods, Brāhmaņas and preceptors with devotion,…. desiring no (reward) for his faith and doings (?)¹

(L. 5) Success ! Hail ! This is a famous glorious work,─the image of the goddess made, by the grace of the feet of Viśvakarman, (by an artist) who is absorbed in the glory (springing from) the ocean of liberality, prowess (and) justice…… of the Mahārāja, the glorious lord of Chēdi, the illustrious Karna.

No. 50; PLATE XL
GOHARWA PLATES OF KARNA

THESE plates were turned up by the plough of a Kewat in an old fort at Goharwa, a village in the Manjhanpur tahsil of the Allahabad District. They were edited, with collotype plates, but without a translation, by Dr. E. Hultzsch in the Epigraphia Indica, Vol. XI, pp. 139 ff. They are edited here from the same plates.

‘These are two copper-plates, resembling ordinary trays, which fit one into the other and form a compact box, with corresponding ring holes at the bottom of the first and the top of the second plate. They were originally held together by a ring, in such a way that the inscription was inside. The box measures nearly 15¾ inches in length and about 11½ inches in breadth. The second plate, which fits into the box, is a little smaller than the first. The depth of the margin of each plate is about ½ inch.’ The plough in turning up the plates broke the ring. The seal was thus detached from the plates. ‘It is bell-shaped and has an almost circular surface which measures 3 inches in diameter. The upper portion of the seal bears in relief a seated figure of the goddess Lakshmī, facing the front and attended by two elephants pouring water over her. At the bottom is a bull couchant, facing the proper right between two indistinct symbols (drums ?). Across the center is engraved the name of the king who issued the plates─Śrimat-Karŋŋadēvah.’2 The inscription is throughout in a state of excellent preservation.

The characters belong to the Nāgarī alphabet and resemble those of the Banaras plates of the same king. There are, however, some minor differences. The letter n, for instance, is everywhere without a dot; similarly the upper loop of th is closed in all cases. But in the case of the initial i, th, ph, bh and ś, the present record invariably shows an advanced stage. The older form of the initial i, consisting of a comma below two dots, which is seen to continue even in the Banaras plates, is here replaced by a sign approximating to the modern form of the vowel, see iti,1.3; th appears here for the first time with a vertical stroke over the loop, see -pāda-pithas=, 1.8; the tailed curve to the right of the vertical of ph has now sunk lower down, see phalam, 1.46; the wedge on the left of bh has given place to a vertical which is joined to the right limp by means of a horizontal stroke, see alabhata and –bhūshanam-, both in 1.4; ś has everywhere the modern Nāgarī form, see, e.g., karma-vaśāt= 1.14; the peculiar form of the ligature śr is also approximated in this record, see śrīkantha-, 1.6. Besides these, we may note that n is in many cases written without a loop,
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¹ As the readings in this and the following lines are in many cases doubtful, I am not quite sure of the intended sense.
² From the account given by Hultzsch, Ep. Ind., Vol. XI, PP. 139-40. I take the symbols near the bull to be incense-pots, see above, p. 236, n. 1.

CORPUS INCRIPTIONUM INDICARUM
PAIKORE STONE PILLAR INSCRIPTION OF KARNA