138 Letter from General Cunningham. [Aua. 



" May this poem, written by me in Balabhi, the protected of the 

 great king S'ridharasena, be to the glory of the king, since the king is 

 the well-doer of the people." 



The Balabhi here mentioned is obviously Balabhipura, the capital of 

 the Saurashtra kingdom, and we know from Wathen's copper-plates that 

 there were three S'ridharasenas in the Balabhi, Balahara, or Balarais 

 dynasty. 



The first of them reigned in A. D. 319. He was followed by Sila- 

 ditya I, Charagriha I, and then by a second S'ridharasena. We have 

 then a Dhruva-sena and then a third S'ridhara-sena. Which of these 

 three kings was the patron of the poet cannot be made out, but there is 

 no reasonable doubt that one of them was ; and we may, therefore, safely 

 place the time of our poet to be the middle or end of the fourth century 

 A. D. As regards the name of the father, the first idea suggested by this 

 stanza is that the commentators confounded the patron with the father 

 of the poet, but, seeing that S'ridhara in the case of the king is followed 

 by the epithet sena, and in the case of the father by Svami, it might 

 reasonably be urged that S'ridhara the father was distinct from the king 

 of that name. The poet has named the king, and the scholiasts have given 

 the name of the poet's father. Anyhow it is obvious from the epithets 

 assigned to him, and from the way in which he refers to the king, that the 

 poet was not a king, nor the son of a king, nor a prime-minister. He 

 was a Brahman poet and grammarian of Balabhipura, and had no relation 

 whatever to Vikramarka, Chandragupta, Vararuchi or Bhartrihari. The 

 time usually assigned to Bhartrihari is the 3rd century of the Christian 

 era, whereas my deductions bring Bhatti to the middle or end of the 

 4th century, showing a difference of about a hundred years — a slight 

 difference in the case of oriental literary history, and by no means such 

 as to prevent scholiasts of the 16th or the 17th or the 18th century from 

 easily confounding the two authors. 



Dr. A. F. E. Hoernle read the following extracts from a letter from 

 General A. Cunningham on some of the Antiquities exhibited at previous 

 meetings of the Society. 



" The gold coin with a ring, of which an engraving is given in the 

 Proceedings for February, is quite new to me. I should like to have read 

 the legend as 



Sri Champa Eaja 

 but there seems to be a vowel over the first letter of the name — unless 

 indeed it be only an ornament. Can it be Chaidya Eaja— The Eaja of 

 Chadi ? 



