368 Account of an Inscription [July, 



The subject of the inscription is the erection of the temple, in whose 

 yet splendid ruins it was found, to Siva. Mahadeva, under a name 

 by which he is not generally known elsewhere — Sri' Harsha : 

 the latter word {^^joyj, being still the name of a village in the 

 neighbourhood, and apparently of the high mountain itself, as we 

 learn from the descriptions of the site now published. The inscription, 

 however, connects this name with an event of great celebrity in the 

 mythology of India, — Siva's destruction of the Asura or demon Tri- 

 pura, who had expelled Indra and his gods from Svarga or heaven ; 

 and his reception of the praises of the restored celestials on this very 

 mountain : whence the name of Joy is stated to have been derived 

 to this hill, and the surrounding region, as well as to the great deity 

 as here worshipped. 



After some of the ordinary topics of praise to Siva, in which the 

 mythology of the Puranas and the deeper mystical theology of the Upa- 

 nishads are blended in the usual manner, — and after the commemora- 

 tion of this peculiar seat of his worship, — the author begins in the 13th 

 of his varied stanzas, to recount the predecessors of the two Shekavati 

 princes, to whose liberality the temple was most indebted. A genea- 

 logy of six princes, of the same distinguished family whose head 

 then held the neighbouring kingdom of Ajmeer, — the family of the 

 Chahumana or Chohans, — is continued regularly from father to son, 

 and terminated in Sinha Ra'ja, in whose reign this work appears to 

 have been commenced, A. D. 961. Then comes a seventh king of a 

 totally different family, being sprung from the solar race of Raghu. 

 The name of this descendant of Ra'ma is Vigraha Ra'ja ; but in what 

 character he appears as the successor of the former princes, whether 

 as a conqueror or as a liberator from the power of other conquerors,— 

 and in what manner, if at all, he allied himself to the former race which 

 he is said to have restored, is not distinctly stated in the three verses 

 ((9, 20, and 21), where the succession is recorded. We find only that 

 in his liberality to this temple of the god of Joy, he emulated and surpassed 

 the donations of his apparently less fortunate predecessor Sinha Raja', 

 and that in his time it was probably completed, twelve years after its 

 commencement, in A. D. 973. From this list of monarchs, which is not 

 without value as illustrating the discordant and divided state of India at 

 this critical epoch of its history, the author passes in the 28th verse to 

 what is of paramount importance in the Hindu mind — the commemora- 



and precision as in the greater part of the Odes of Horace. These seven 

 measures are interspersed with the two other metres and with each other ad 

 libitum, as in the drama, and other classical writings of the Hindus. 



