10 R. L. Mitra — On a Copper-plate from CuttacTc. [JAiii. 



lound it) an old box in the office of the Cuttack Collectorate, where it had lain 

 since 1810, when it was filed as an exhibit in support of a claim tor some 

 rent-free land. That the two plates refer to the same person is borne out also 

 by the fact that the same person, Madhava, was the engraver of both the 

 records, and the style of the letters is closely alike. If this identification be 

 accepted we get three names of the same dynasty, thus — 

 I. Bhava-gupta. 

 II. S'iva-gupta. 

 III. Mahadeva-gupta. 

 Babu Rangalala Banurji assumed that the first two were scions of the 

 later Gupta kings of Magadha, and that Yayati the actual donor was a 

 lieutenant of S'iva-gupta, and I have already accepted these assumptions to 

 be correct.* Without them it is not possible to explain why Yayati, who was 

 well known as a most powerful king of Orissa and founder of the 

 Kesari line, should, in a solemn religious patent, recite the name of S'iva- 

 gupta as the paramount sovereign. We know from the Aphsar inscription 

 that there was a long line of Gupta kings in Behar, and they called them- 

 selves the lords of the three Kalihgas, and that Bhava-gupta was one of 

 them, while there is nothing to show that there were any Gupta kings to 

 the west or south of Orissa who could claim supremacy in that country. 

 The progress of Yayati was from the north ; he first took Yajapur, 

 then Bhuvanes'vara, and then Puri, and a paramount sovereign for him 

 can be looked for only on the north, and that is Behar. And such being 

 the case, the date of the record must be about the middle of the 6th century. 

 Yayati's reign extended from A. D. 474 to 526, and he lived in the time of 

 S'iva-gupta, and the plates under notice are dated on the 31st of Mahadeva- 

 gupta, the immediate successor of S'iva-gupta. Had Yayati been living then, 

 it is certain that so powerful a chieftain would have been named in the re- 

 cord, to give it weight, and as his name does not occur we must look for 

 the date some time after A. D. 526. 



The most serious objection to this identification would be the style of 

 writing, which being Kutila, the inference would at once be drawn by some 

 that the record is of the 10th century ; but as I have already elsewhere 

 shown that the Kutila character had a much wider range than a single 

 century, it is not necessary to notice it here. The history of Orissa from 

 the 7th century upwards is well known, and we have no Yayati son of 

 Janamejaya in the Orissan history after that date. We must, therefore, 

 accept the Yayati of the plate to be the founder of the Kesari line, and 

 since his name is associated with the Kutila character in an unquestionably 



* Vide my Antiquities of Orissa, II, p. 58. The district of Kos'ala obviously was 

 situated ia Orissa, and did not form, as supposed by Babu Rangalala Banurji, a part 

 of Oudh. 



