182 PLilological Secretary — Feports on Coins. [Aug. 



inscriptions (see Indian Antiquary, Vol. XV, pp. 222, 253, 257). From 

 these it is seen, that he was " a powerful king, whose dominions 

 included the whole of the northern part of India, from the river 

 Brahmaputra to the Western ocean, and from the Himalayas to the 

 mountain Mahendra (in the South), who possessed countries which 

 not even the Guptas and Hunas could subdue ; and to whom homage 

 was done by even the famous king Mihirakula " of Kashmir {ihid., 

 p. 255). This would seem to imply that at one time Kashmir had been 

 conquered by this Ya^ovarman. In any case the statement affords some 

 support for attributing to him the coins under review bearing his name. 

 It may perhaps be worth noting, that there is nothing in the 

 three inscriptions found in Malva which absolutely proves that that 

 country was the original dominion of Yasovarman. The inscriptions 

 show clearly, that he was a person of no known lineage, but originally 

 an obscure 'tribal chieftain' {jinendra or narddhipati) , who suc- 

 ceeded in conquering the countries around him and thus founding 

 an empire and a family, — possibly of no long duration. On doing so, 

 he changed his name to Vishnuvardhana, and assumed the imperial 

 titles rdjddhirdja and paramesvara. He may have been one of the 

 Indo-Scythian chieftains of the Panjab, and by the pillars which bear 

 his inscriptions he may have marked the southern extent of his 

 victories, and the place where he transferred his capital. It is true 

 in the inscriptions his name is spelled Yasodharman ; but the two letters 

 dh and v are not unfrequently confounded, and there are other well- 

 known examples of words which are found spelled both with dh and v. 



The name of the king, as given on the reverse, is worth noting. 

 It reads S'ri-Yasovarma?)!. There is a distinct anusvara(?>2) over the 

 final akshara rma. The orthography and inflection of the name dis- 

 tinctly belong to the language which may be defined as the literary 

 form of the North- Western Prakrit (the so-called Gatha dialect), a partial 

 sanskritisation of the vernacular Prakrit. Yasovarma?n, which in other 

 respects agrees with Sanskrit usages, has the Prakrit nominative singu- 

 lar masculine termination atn, instead of the regular Sanskrit termina- 

 tion md. The termination am is here formed after the analogy of 

 such words as hhagavatn, araliam, etc. An exact parallel, made after 

 the same analogy, is the nominative singular masculine form sihifn 

 (for Sanskrit sihhi), quoted in E. Mliller's Beitrdge zur Grammatik des 

 Jaina Prakrit, p. 51. It is also worth noting, that in the old 

 S'auraseni Prakrit (according to Hemachandra, IV, 264) the vocative 

 singular of words of this class may end in am; e. g., bho rdyain 

 'O king' (of rdjd), hlio viayavammain '0 Vijaya-varma' (of vijaya- 

 varmd) ; and the wording of Hemachandra's rule IV, 265 is sufficiently 



