430 Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. [December, 1914. 



help us in fixing the year of Yasodharmman' s accession. 

 Mr. Pargiter should not have accepted Dr. Hoernle's con- 

 clusions beforehand, but should have waited for the appear- 

 ance of the proofs, which Dr. Hoemle may be holding in 

 abeyance in support of his proposed identification. Yaso- 

 dharmman may have had the Biruda of Dharmmaditya, 

 but this again requires proof. Consequently, it must be taken 

 for granted that Dr. Hoernle's proposed identification of 

 Dharmmaditya with Yasodharmman is not correct , and his 

 proposal for accepting the year 528 a.d. as the initial year 

 of Yasodharmman is not based on facts, In fact, there is 

 no sufficient ground to hold that the date of the grant A is 

 531 a.d. and his treatment of my analysis of the eharae 

 ters of these four grants cannot be accepted. The genuineness 

 of all these inscriptions is to be doubted because he used 

 obsolete forms in conjunction with forms of much later date. 

 The same thing must be said of his next statement: "and it 

 appears they (the Eastern and Western form of H) were used 

 indifferently because both are used in the same words." On 

 the other hand, this will have to be taken as a conclusive proof 

 of the fact that the writer or writers of the inscriptions were 

 not aware that he or they were using characters which were 

 impossible when used in the same inscription. This fact is 

 further proved by the characters used in the seals. Mr. Pargi- 

 ter has himself admitted that in one ca3e at least the form 

 of a character used in the inscription is earlier than that used 

 in the seal. Usually a seal, the impression of which is placed on 

 a grant, is older than the grant itself, for one and the same seal 

 is used to seal a number of documents. I believe Mr. Pargiter 

 would not admit that in the ancient days people made a 

 separate seal for each document and sealed the document some 

 decades after it had been drawn up. It may be asserted that 

 the seals were made in the Western Provinces of Northern 

 India, while the documents were drawn up in the East; but 

 this explanation cannot be accepted because the practice itself 

 is unusual. We find another unsupportable assumption in Mr. 

 Parser's date of second inscriptions, which he avers is "567 

 at the latest/' I fail to understand what reason there can 

 be to place Yasodharmman's death in 588 a.d. and what 

 connection Yasodharmman may have with Dharmmaditya. 

 Mr. Pargiter based his final conclusion upon premises which 

 have not yet been proved to be true, and states "Those grants 

 show clearly that the two forms (of H) were in use side by side 

 in this region during the 6th century." Fresh comment is 

 unnecessary, because these grants prove nothing beyond the 

 fact that the characters used in them belong to two or three 

 different centuries. He continues to state that the Eastern 

 variety of the early Gupta alphabet was used in Eastern India 

 at least a century and a half than my estimate. Having come 



