Kharoshthi Inscriptions (With The Exception of Those of Asoka) (An Old and Rare Book)

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Preface

More than ten years ago arrangements were concluded for the preparation of a volume of Kharoshthi and Brahmi inscriptions, to be edited jointly by Professors Luders and Rapson and to be issued as vol. ii of the Corpus inscriptionum Indicarum.

In 1922 Professor Rapson intimated that his other engagements precluded him from undertaking the work, and, at the suggestion of the Government of India, the Secretary of State for India in Council decided to offer the vacant post to me, and this was done in a letter of the 17th November 1922.

Having already devoted much time to the study of Kharoshthi and Kharoshthi inscriptions I gladly accepted the offer, though I much regretted that Professor Rapson, with his unrivalled knowledge of Kharoshthi, had not been able to undertake the task.

During the six years which have passed since then I have given most of my time to the work.

Through the courtesy of the Indian Government I was able to visit the chief Indian Museums and examine the originals of most Kharoshthi inscriptions in the first months of 1925, and through the kind services of Sir John Marshall I have been provided with estampages and photographs of all the inscriptions preserved in India. The authorities of the British Museum and the Royal Asiatic Society have sent me photographs of the inscriptions in their possession, and the India Office has been good enough to prepare for my use an excellent plaster-of-Paris cast of the Mathura Lion Capital. Finally, the French authorities have, at the request of the Foreign Office, graciously placed at my disposal reproductions of the Kharoshthi records preserved in the French capital. For all the assistance given me in this way I beg to offer my sincere thanks.

My friends Professors Karlgren, Luders, and Thomas have laid me under heavy obligation in connexion with my work. Professor Karlgren has gone through the proofs of the introduction and saved me from several mistakes. Professor Thomas has kindly read the proofs of the whole volume, and both he and Professor Luders have on several occasions discussed many difficult points with me and helped me in many ways. I have tried to acknowledge the assistance I have received in this way, but I am afraid that I have done so unsatisfactorily, and in this place I should like to give expression to the cordial gratitude which I feel towards them.

Finally, I wish to add that it is largely due to the Oxford University Press if the outer appearance of the book will be found satisfactory. To people who have often had to fight some printing-office in order to produce fairly acceptable work it is a rare experience to co-operate with the Clarendon Press and to feel that there is no fight, but only a competition in order to make the results as excellent as it is possible at the present day.

Introduction

Kharoshthi cannot, like Brahmi, be characterized as the national alphabet of India. It has, it is true, been developed on Indian soil and for noting down the sounds of an Indian language,' but its use was restricted to a comparatively limited territory, and even there we have occasional indications of Brahmi having been employed, e. g. in ancient seal legends from Taxila.

Buhler has shown that the Kharoshthi characters are derived from Aramaic, which (was in common use for official purposes all over the Achaemenian empire during the) period when it comprised north-western India. Some features, such as the vowel system and the compound consonants, point to the conclusion that the alphabet was elaborated with the help of Brahmi, which must accordingly have been in existence for some time previously.

From the purely Indian point of view there was not, therefore, any necessity for framing a new script. And Buhler is evidently right in assuming that Kharoshthi is 'the result of the intercourse between the offices of the Satraps and of the native authorities, the Indian chiefs and the heads of towns and villages, whom, as the accounts of the state of the Panjab at the time of Alexander's invasion show, the Persians left in possession in consideration of the payment of their tribute. The Hindus probably used at first the pure Aramaic characters, just as in much later times they adopted the Arabic writing for a number of their dialects, and they introduced in the course of time the modifications observable in the Kharoshthi alphabet.

This development may have taken some time. It was an accomplished fact in the I middle of the third century B.C., when the alphabet was used in the Mansehra and Shahbazgarhi versions of Asoka's edicts, though Aramaic was then still in use, as shown by the Aramaic inscription found at Taxila, in which Professor Andreas has recognized Asoka's usual designation Priyadarsin: The alphabet then remained in use for more than half a millennium, the last known Kharoshthi inscriptions dating from the fourth or fifth century A. D.

Buhler has pointed out that Kharoshthi is evidently a clerk's and not a Pandit's k alphabet. Outside of India we find it used also in books, in the Dutreuil de Rhins manuscript containing a version of the Dhammapada in a north-western Prakrit, which has been found near Khotan. It is possible that the same may sometimes have been the case in India, and it is even possible that the Dutreuil de Rhins manuscript was written in India. The only old manuscript actually found in India within the territory and the period covered by Kharoshthi inscriptions is, however, written in Brahmi.

The area within which we can prove Kharoshthi to have been regularly used belongs to the north-west. The easternmost limit is, in the Panjab, at Manikiala. There are' two inscriptions from Kangra, where Kharoshthi is used in addition to Brahmi, and there is another record from Kamal, which shows that the alphabet was known further to the east, and foreign conquerors from the north-west used it in a well-known inscription in Mathura on the Jamna, where Brahmi was the common alphabet, also in inscriptions and on coins. We even possess a Kharoshthi record from Patna.

But the plaque on which it is written has evidently been left there by a person who came from the north-west. We do not know exactly how far the use of Kharoshthi extended towards the west. Coins with Kharoshthi legends have been found in Seistan and Kandahar, but the western most Kharoshthi inscriptions which have been found are from Khawat in Afghanistan and, side by side with Brahmi records, from the Thal valley in Baluchistan. And even here we have every reason for assuming that the alphabet was brought and used by immigrants from the east. For it is little suited for the requirements of Iranian languages, and we have nothing to show that the dialect in which most Kharoshthi records are written was ever spoken as a vernacular much further east than Jalalabad.

The northernmost Kharoshthi records come from Tirath in Swat and Khalatse in Ladakh, and in the south we have some fragments from Mohenjo Daro in the Larkana district and Kharoshthi legends on the coins of some of the oldest of the Western Kshatrapas. But such stray instances do not prove anything more for the proper Kharoshthi area than the Kharoshthi word lipikarena in the Siddapur edicts of Asoka. The Kharoshthi area proper may be defined as extending from about 69° to 73° 30' E. and from the Hindu Kush to about 33° N., and there can be little doubt that its place of origin was Gandhara, perhaps more especially Taxila.

Professor Sylvain Levi has given a different account of the origin of Kharoshthi. From a notice in Chinese Buddhist literature, according to which the correct form of the name Shu-le, i. e. Kashgar, is K'ia-lu-shu-ta(n)-le, which, according to M. Levi, corresponds to Sanskrit Kharoshtra, he draws the conclusion that the correct name of the alphabet was Kharoshtri, and that this name means' the script of Kharoshtra i. e. Kashgar.

Messrs. O. Franke and R. Pischel protested against this explanation," and M. Levi S modified his theory and rIl9.lntained that Kharoshtri was the script of Kharoshtra, and this again an old Indian designation of the country between India and China. Franke objected that we have no such Sanskrit word as Kharoshtra, that the Chinese Kia-lu- shu-tan-lu can hardly be a rendering of such a form, and that the Indian name of the alphabet is given as Kharoshthi, Kharotthi in Indian sources.

So far as I can see, M. Levi's theory is hardly reconcilable with what we know about the history of the alphabet.

I t is true that numerous Kharoshthi documents have been found in Chinese Turkestan, notably in the eastern oases to the south of the desert, and that the only known Kharoshthi manuscript comes from the Khotan country. The alphabet is, however, everywhere used for writing an Indian language, and we should a priori be inclined to think that it was brought to Turkestan by Indian immigrants. Moreover, the manuscript and the documents belong to a comparatively late date, none of them being apparently older than the second century A. D.

In India, on the other hand, the use of Kharoshthi can be traced back to the third century B. C. Moreover, Buhler seems to me to have' proved definitely that it has been evolved from Aramaic to suit the exigencies of an Indian language; and we know that Aramaic was used in the Achaemenian offices and also that it was used in north-western India. At the time when' Kharoshthi came into existence there does not seem to have been any Indian settlement in Turkestan, which was then peopled by various nomadic tribes, who do not seem to have been in possession of any developed civilization.

It therefore seems to me that we must accept Buhler's view about the origin of Kharoshthi, I also think that he was right in assuming that the name was in India considered to mean' the script invented by Kharoshtha ', though it is quite possible that it is due to a popular etymology of an Aramaic word meaning' writing', which -sounded like kharottha and was Sanskritized as kharoshtha, ass-lip.

I am not, however, in this place concerned with the origin and the older history of Kharoshthi, The inscriptions published in this volume do not belong to the period when the script first began to 'be used, and none of them can be brought into connexion with the Achaemenians or with, the Mauryans, who succeeded them as rulers over north- western India.

Most of them belong to the period when new conquerors had made themselves masters of the country, after the downfall of the Mauryan empire, and the oldest of them can be directly connected with these foreign invaders.

Three such peoples are often mentioned together in Indian sources: the Yavanas, the Sakas, and the Pahlavas, and they are all represented in Kharoshthi inscriptions.

The Yavanas or Yonas, i. e. the Greeks, had already made their appearance on Indian soil before the Mauryan dynasty came into being. Lt was, however, only at a somewhat later date that they began to penetrate the north-western provinces in earnest. In the first half of the second century B.C. Greek rulers crossed the Hindukush and made themselves masters of the Kabul country and north-western India: the houses of Euthydemus and Eucratides. And Greek princes held their own in these districts down to the first century B. C.

Demetrius, who seems to have made himself master of parts of India about 175 B.C., began to use Kharoshthi in his coin legends, and this practice was continued down to the last Greek ruler In the Kabul valley, Hermaeus, In the first century A.D.

Most of these rulers are only known from their coins, and our information about them is rather scanty. We can, however, see that their conquest led to the result that Greek notions came to exercise a certain influence in the Indian borderland, notably in the framing of the calendar and in the development of Buddhist art.

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