i00 Bhoja Raja of Dhar and his Homonyms. [No. 2, 
the year 1063 A. C. which, if assumed to be the era of the inserip- 
tion, would place our Bhoja at the end of the thirteenth century 
when Thaneswar and its neighbourhood were entirely in the hands of 
the Mahomedans. The same may be said of the Sivasifha Samvat* of 
the Gohils of Deo the zero of which corresponds with 1112 A.C. No 
other Samvat era is known to have been current, unless it be purely a 
local or a family era, which is very likely, but in that case there is no 
easy prospect of our coming to a solution of the difficulty. A Bhoja 
Deva was king of Lodorvay in 1160 A. C. who would have nearly 
corresponded with the prince of Pehewa by assuming the first figure 
of our date to be 1 and the reading the second figure to be also 1 and 
not 2, thereby making the whole 1179 Samvat as supposed by Col. 
Cunningham, but unfortunately he was the son of Berjrae and not of 
Ramachandra. The same genealogical difficulty prevents our iden- 
tifying him with the Rao Bhoja of Harouti, who was the son of 
Soorjun, and a contemporary of Akbart (A. C. 1575). 
The style of writing is generally appealed to as a chronological guide 
in cases where the reading of the date is doubtful. This undoubtedly 
is a good test to some extent; but Dr. Weber carries it too far when 
he assumes that in a case where the date fluctuates between 179 and 
279 the style of writing may be allowed to settle the difference. This 
can scarcely be the case, except in very modern writings and at certain 
turning points; and even then it takes a much ionger time than a 
century for one peculiar style of writing to pass so markedly into 
another as to afford a conclusive evidence of age; and this without 
adverting to local and individual peculiarities which so materially 
affect its uniformity. Nothing is more common than a single style of 
writing spreading over two or three centuries, or predominating in 
certain regions while it is dying out in others. The history of the 
Roman character in different parts of Europe during the last century 
affords a singular instance in point. James Prinsep, who was the first 
to deyise a system of palewographic chronology for India§ in which the 
style of writing was taken as an index to the age of the document 
in which it was found, was fully sensible of the fact, and he accord- 
ingly assigned a range of three centuries to his No. I. or Lat cha- 
* Thomas’s Prinsep, Vol. II. p. 158. 
+ Tod’s Rajasthan, Vol. IL. p. 242. 
{ Tod’s Rajasthan, Vol. II. p 475. 
§ Ante, Vol, VII. p. 276, plate XIII. 
