2 Restoration and Translation [Jaw. 



transcript would much increase our information from this source, 

 may also be doubted. Lieutenant Cunningham, to whose zeal and 

 activity the inquirers into Indian antiquities are so deeply indebted, 

 states that he made the transcript of this Bhitari inscription under 

 very serious disadvantages : but I am not disposed to attribute to 

 any imperfections arising from this cause, the whole or even the 

 greater part of the errors discoverable in the inscription as now exhi- 

 bited. Some are certainly chargeable on the sculptor who formed 

 the letters on the pillar, unfaithfully representing the remembered or 

 written archetype before him : and these errors are of sufficient mag- 

 nitude to induce the probable belief, that others occasioning more 

 perplexity in the deciphering, may have arisen from the same source. 

 From whatever source, however, they proceed, they are capable of 

 being completely detected and amended in all the earlier part of the 

 inscription : viz. the introduction, and the laudatory verses that follow j 

 but when the verse suddenly ceases or changes, and that in the midst 

 of the stanza, as it does about the middle of the 14th line on the 

 pillar, — it is impossible to say how far errors of the same kind with 

 those before found and corrected, (such as this sudden cessation itself 

 seems to indicate) may have produced the general unintelligibility of 

 the document until we come to its last line, the 19th. With the 

 exception of those four lines and a half, the rest, notwithstanding the 

 indistinctness of many of the letters (indicated by the frequent double 

 readings and occasional lacunae in Lieutenant Cunningham's pencil 

 copy), and the more serious difficulty arising from the positive errors 

 above mentioned, may be interpreted with sufficient confidence. 



That I may not, however, seem to be gratuitously imputing error 

 to an unknown artist more than twelve centuries dead, with a view to 

 screen the want of skill or accuracy in his living transcribers and 

 interpreters, — I am bound to make good the charge in question in 

 detail, and in a manner that may bring conviction to the mind 

 of every competent scholar. The substitution of "^ for ^r in the 

 word ^JfTI^Ifi* (cohibitis-affectibus-viri) in the 6th line, is certainly 

 the mistake of the graver, not of his copyist : as is also the equally 

 evident substitution in the following line of the trisyllable Trfsicrl 

 prithivi for its synonyme TT*«ft prithvi {the earth) ; where the latter 

 word of two long syllables is indispensably required by the measure 

 of the verse, indicated as it is by all the preceding and subsequent 

 words in a manner not to be mistaken. These words in their 

 written forms in the ancient character, are too unlike what are 

 severally substituted for them to make this the possible error of a 

 European copyist unacquainted with Sanscrit, — while they are pre- 



