24 Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. [N.S., XV, 
have all been compiled under the aegis of the sovereign Chief 
by men in his employment or in his train. Works like these 
cannot be explained as being merely the outcome of private 
initiative, it is clear that they must have grown under the 
encouragement of the Chief. Possibly, while ordinary Bhatas 
were going about begging village for village and door for door 
with their eesti scribbles as they do to-day, other men 
better trained in methodical and accurate work were compiling 
the pidhiyavalis ithe capital, probably in part from the very 
data furnished to them by the travelling Bhatas. It is not 
unreasonable to one that these compilers of the got valis 
were the same men who compiled the chronicles, and bro 
the same accuracy and methodicity to bear on both the w i 
Certainly, accuracy and methodicity are not qualities to be 
balanced judgment ruled by fits of passion and a manner of 
expression deformed by an irresistible tendency towards hy- 
perbole and fiction. Bhatas were poets from the earliest times 
to at least three centuries ago, and now that they are no 
longer poets, are nothing more than ignorant charlatans, often 
even more ignorant than the simple people they dupe. Now, 
poets can hardly be believed to have been the compilers of the 
pidhiyavalis. The Bhatas were the repositories of genealogical 
lore from the earliest times, no doubt, but no Bhata probably 
ever possessed the ability of embodying the loose and un- 
shaped materials in his possession into an organic work, and if 
he ever tried to give a literary and finished shape to these 
materials, it was the sg gh of poetry. There are numbers of 
genealogical verses—-l.e. verses containing pedigrees—in 
existence, and these might well be the production of the 
Bhatas of some centuries a 
Internal and external sii combine to show that the 
These genealogical verses are usually in the form of kavitias. They 
are of two kinds: dynastic and genealogical. The former recor 
names of a series of rulers who sneuda? one another, and sometimes 
i irr phase reigns. The latter 
ore commonly record the names of the sons of a particular Chief, as 
the kavitia following which contains the names of the twelve sons of 
rava Cadé: , 
ne 
= 
@® 
ot 
oa 
i) 
qb 
S 
B 
§ 
° 
eh 
tq 
oO 
Laat) 
er 
a 
2 
frqae tat wg 
Hat VtTSS VST | 
Usa At LAP 
yat afe Wa Wa az | 
art BCSHATS 
ahea gat wihagu | 
afeaaie a fast 
TS ey Sat HET 
