1875.] Rajendralala Mitra — On a Coin of Kunanda from Karndl. 83 



The differences in the letters of the obverse legend are not numerous, 

 but they are well-marked and unmistakable. The first letter in the B.ritish 

 Museum specimen is shaped somewhat like an English s, whereas in the speci- 

 men before me it is clearly like the English j ; it is, however, in either case 

 intended to stand for the Sanskrit ^ = r. The second letter in the former 

 specimen, is a compound of j and n followed by a visarga, the Sanskrit 'sf: = 

 jnah, — the j taking the full depth of the line with the visarga after it, and the 

 n hanging down below it. In the latter the n occupies the place of the j in the 

 body of the line, and the j, if it ever existed, must have stood above the line, 

 and is lost by the want of space in the margin. The visarga occurs after the n. 

 In the former case the word has to be read rajnah, the genitive singular of 

 rdjan — ' of a king', and in the latter, if the assumption of a j over the n be 

 not admitted, randh the type of the modern rand, ' a king'. The name 

 which follows being in the genitive, the epithet should also be in the same 

 case, and so I have no doubt that when the margin of the coin was perfect, 

 there was a j over the line just above the n, and the word was rajnah, the 

 genitive of rdjan, as in Mr. Thomas's specimen. 



In the second word, the nasal mark (anusvara) after the n is absent in 

 the British Museum specimen as figured by Mr. Thomas, but it is distinct 

 in Mr. Carleton's coin. 



The first half of the third word is identical in both, but the second half 

 in the specimen before me is clearly bhatisa, and not bhatasa as shown in 

 Mr. Thomas's figure, nor bhratasa as it has been read by that gentleman. 



In the last word maharajasa, the r is formed of a perpendicular stroke 

 Hke an I, and not a stroke with a curled tail like J, as in the first word 

 and in the British Museum specimen. The «T = j is also slightly different, 

 being more like the Greek % than the English £, as in the latter. 



Adverting to the reading of the second word, Mr. Thomas says : " The 

 monarch's name on this series of coins has hitherto, by common consent, 

 been transcribed as Kunanda, and tested by the more strict laws of its own 

 system of Palaeography, the initial compound, in Indian Pali, would prefer- 

 entially represent the letters leu. There can be little doubt, the true normal 

 form of the short u ([_), which can be traced downwards in its consistent 

 modifications in most of the Western Inscriptions, though the progressive 

 Gangetic mutations completely reversed the lower stroke of their u (^3). 

 The cpuestion of the correct reading of the designation has, however, been 

 definitively set at rest by the Bactrian counterpart legends on the better 

 preserved specimens of the coinage, where the initial combination figures 

 as kr, a transliteration which any more close and critical examination of 

 the rest of the Indian Pali legend would, of itself, have suggested, in the 

 parallel use of the same subjunct |_ in ^<T bhrata."* 



* Journal, R. As. Soc, N. S., I., p. 476. 



