ADA Remarks on the Taxila Inscription. [No. 4, 
purvaye’ to the date, and not, as I did, to the general context. This 
leaves the words “ Chhahara and Chukhsa” free to represent the names 
of those districts of which Liako Kusuluko was Satrap. In the first 
instance I was inclined to look upon this phrase as the equivalent of 
the Sans. etat-purve “ before this,’ and could this rendering have been 
made consistent with grammar, it might have been worked in; for 
the Inscription speaks of the erection of the buildiny in the past, and 
the deposit of the relic in the present. I had no knowledge of the 
same or similar phrases having been met with in other Inscriptions, 
and not seeing how to connect the words with the date, I very dubi- 
ously rendered them as signifying “in the presence.” General Cun- 
ningham says he has found the same words in an Inscription which 
he has lately discovered at Sravasti,* and that a similar phrase occurs 
in the Mathura Inscription. These, however, remain unpublished, and 
the enly other records in which the phrase is used, are the Grants of 
King Hastin and the Inscriptions of Krikaina, which were published 
in this Journal in 1861 by Professor Fitz-EKdward Hall, and which 
unfortunately had not come under my notice when I made my transla- 
tion. The interpretation which Professor Hall put forth, in his very 
careful reproduction and translation of these Inscriptions, has been 
adopted by General Cunningham, and he accordingly translates the 
expression etaye purvaye as “ on this aforesaid date.” The true mean- 
Ing of purva is “ first, prior,’ and if two dates were given it would 
refer to the first of them. The word might possibly have the sense 
of purvokta, “ aforesaid,” but I cannot admit this to be its meaning 
in the Inscription before us. It is not credible that a document of 
such remarkable conciseness and brevity, should, immediately after the 
date and without the intervention of a single word, employ the need- 
less tautology “on this aforesaid date.’”’ The same observation is 
applicable to the equivalent phrase in Professor Hall’s Inscriptions. 
In every instance it is used in immediate connection with the date— 
never in the middle or towards the end of the record, where such a 
form of words as “ on the aforesaid date” might be required to obviate 
ambiguity. A careful consideration of all the passages in which the 
* He also reads it immediately after the date in the Manikyala Inscription. 
The word purva is most probably there, as I have pointed out; but we are 
hardly justified in reading “ etaye pwrvaye.” The first and last letters are dis- 
tinct in my tracings—they are certainly different from the e of which we have 
an example at the end of the first line. 
