118 Coins of the Nine Ndgas. [No. 3, 



for a long name. Thus on some of the coins of Brihaspati-Naga the 

 name is given at full length, while on others it is contracted to Bri- 

 haspati and Brihaspa, and even to Briha. Similarly, the name of 

 Deva Naga is contracted to Deva Na and Deva, while that of Gana- 

 pati himself is variously rendered as Ganapatya and Ganendra on the 

 larger coins, and as Gana and even Ga on the smaller coins. A simi- 

 lar omission of the family appellation may be observed on many of the 

 contemporary coins of the Guptas, on which the names of Chandra, 

 Samuclra, Kumara, Skanda and Nara are found alone under the Kaja's 

 arm without the additional title of Gupta which, as we know from 

 other coins and inscriptions, certainly belonged to all of them. From 

 these instances I infer that the title of Naga belonged not only to 

 Ganapati himself but to every one of the early princes of Narwar, 

 whose coins form the first series of the accompanying plate. 



5. The period to which these princes must be assigned depends 

 solely on the date of their contemporaries, the Guptas. In 1851, 

 when I wrote my account of the Bhilsa Topes, I referred the begin- 

 ning of the Gupta era to the year 319 A. B., but shortly afterwards on 

 comparing the Gupta gold coins with their Indo- Scythian prototypes, 

 and the Gupta silver coins with the Sah coins of Saurashtra, I saw 

 that the first Guptas must certainly have been contemporary with the 

 earlier princes of the Kushan Scythians, and consequently that their 

 date could not possibly be later than the first century of the Christian 

 era. In 1855 Mr. Thomas devoted a special essay to the determina- 

 tion of the date of the Guptas, in which the subject was most fully 

 and ably treated. In this article, and subsequently in his valuable 

 notes on Prinsep's essays, he inclines to refer the dates of the Gupta 

 coins and inscriptions to the Saka era, an opinion in which I fully 

 concur. But in assigning the Bhilsa inscription of Chandra Gupta, 

 which is dated in the year 93 to the first king of that name, he must 

 have overlooked the Udayagiri Cave inscription of the year 82, which, 

 according to H. H. Wilson, refers to Chandra Gupta's great-grandson, 

 the Raja of Sanakanika. The only scheme, as far as I can see, that 

 will suit all the known dates and other conditions of this dynasty, is 

 to make Chandra Gupta 1st, the founder of the era. By adopting this 

 scheme, his great-grandson the Raja of Sanakanika may be allowed to 

 have been reigning in the year 82, and his grandson Chandra Gupta 



