616 Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. (September, 1911. 
the exception, but in the Badal pillar inscription and in the 
Bhagalpur plate of Narayanapala it is used throughout.’’ In 
the Dinajpur pillar inscription ma, pa and sa are not open at 
the top, and it shares these peculiarities, as well as the loop or 
knob of ma, with the Badal pillar inscription.' Narayanapala is 
the great-great-grandson of Dharmapala. Therefore the Dinaj- 
pur inscription cannot be assigned to an age much earlier than 
that of the Badal pillar inscription. The other limit may be 
roughly fixed by comparing the letters of our inscription with 
those of the Devapada inscription of Vijayasena.” Speaking of 
the development of the Eastern varieties of the Nagari alphabet, 
Biihler writes in his Indian Palwography :—‘‘ Towards the end 
of the eleventh century the Nagari inscriptions of Eastern India 
show such distinct traces of changes leading up to the modern 
Bengali writing, and these changes become so numerous in the 
twelfth century, that it is possible to class their alphabets as 
Proto-Bengali. An approximate idea of the Proto-Bengali 
may be obtained by comparing the characters of the following 
documents, represented in our plates:—(L) of the Deopara 
Pragasti of about .p. 1080-90 [pl. v., col. xviii], which 
993 
executed in Bengal in the eleventh century, ‘‘7, prece@ 
another consonant, is often written by a short line, sideways 
attached to the right side of the aksara of which it forms part, 
not by the superscript sign.’’ °. 
With the help of the historical data furnished by other 
inscriptions it is possible to fix the date of the Gaud 
ti of 
the foreign Kamboja family with greater precision. In the 
J. r 
Arch. Surv. Ind. Rep. 1903-4, p. 222, and plate Ixiv, 4. was 
J.A.8.B. of 1892, Part I, p. 78; Cunningham’s Report, vol. ™) 
plate xxxvii; Ind. Ant., vol. xxi (1892), p. 97. 
