258 Restoration of the Inscription, No. 2, [June, 



and therefore nothing could impede the progress to deciphering the in- 

 scription as far as it remained — provided only the language in which 

 it was written were sufficiently known to us. 



Now that this language was the well-known classical Sanscrit — the 



language of Menu's Institutes, the Puranas, the Kavyas, &c. admits of 



no reasonable doubt. The supposition of its being any older Sanscrit, 



resembling that of the Vedas, to the understanding of which a bhdshya or 



gloss is all but indispensable, is rendered extremely improbable bytheap- 



parent date of the monuments on which inscriptions of the same character 



appear. The style of the Gya Inscription, so satisfactorily deciphered 



by Sir Charles Wilkins in the 1st volume of the Asiatic Researches, 



and the metre in which it is composed, the Sardula-vikridita, (which, 



like all other lyrical measures of that kind occurring in the Hindu 



drama and elsewhere, belongs to a period in the history of the language 



long posterior to that of the great sacred epics, the Ramayana and 



Mahabharata, by which the present classical Sanscrit was fixed,) would 



alone be sufficient to remove such a supposition. 



With this conviction, I determined to subject the Allahabad Inscrip- 

 tion to a close critical examination ; discarding in the first instance all 

 reference to other interpretations of the inscription itself, and pro- 

 ceeding only upon the indubitably deciphered letters of the above men- 

 tioned Gya Inscription, or rather of that portion of it, of which Lieu- 

 tenant Burt has now given us a far better fac simile than what is con- 

 tained in the Society's first volume. Applying this to his excellent copy 

 of the Allahabad Pillar, though at first the limits of discovery appeared no 

 wider, and indeed much narrower, than in what has already been present- 

 ed to the Society, yet by carrying on the results of what was thus ascertain- 

 ed, wherever any glimpses of decided meaning appeared, to the investiga- 

 tion of characters before unknown, and testing the conjectures thus made 

 by other places — the usual result of such inquiries displayed itself. What 

 was at first mere assumption turned to probability, and then to certainty : 

 and such places as the juxta-position of the names of known countries 

 in line 19, but above all, the short clause in line 27 on which the rest 

 of the inscription hangs — (ravi-bhuv6 bdhur ayam ucchritas stambhas, 

 " of this Sun-born king this lofty pillar is the arm") — occurring as 

 they did to me not as the basis of conjecture, but as the unexpected 

 results of inferences from other probable assumptions, — removed all 

 possibility of doubt. And notwithstanding the turgid character of the 

 composition, and the enormous length of the epithets affixed to this 

 " child of the Sun," consisting often of more than 25 words, and filling 

 the whole line — the meaning is sufficiently connected and definite in 

 this, which is the greatest part of the inscription, to remove all doubt 



