1864.] 



On Ancient Indian WeigMs. 



253 



The most prolific field among the favoured resorts of our native 

 coin-collectors, in olden time, chanced to be the exact section of the 

 country constituting the BrahmdvaHa of the Hindu lawgiver ; and 

 Thaneswar — since so celebrated in the annals of the land, as the 

 battle-field of successive contending hosts — contributed, at its local 

 fairs, many of the choicest specimens of the inceptive currencies. In 

 this region the Aryans appear to have almost lost their separate 

 identity^ and to have commenced the transitional process of merging 

 their ethnic individuality amid the resident population, though still 

 asserting religious and incidentally political supremacy. Such a state 

 of things seems vividly shadowed forth in the ethnological definitions 

 preserved in Manu ; and it may possibly prove to be more than a 

 mere coincidence, that the geographical distribution of the limits of 

 " Brahmarshi, as distinguished from Brahmavarta" in the same pas- 

 sage, should so nearly be identical with the general boundaries I have 

 already traced^ from independent sources, for the spread of the Bactri- 

 an alphabet in its Southern course. 



I reproduce my latest observations on this subject. 



"The Bactrian, Arian, or Arianian alphabet, unlike its southern contem- 

 porary, the Indian Pali, has no pretension whatever to an indigenous origina> 

 tion ; it would seem to have accompanied or followed, in its archaic and imper- 

 fect form, the Aryan immigration from Media, based as it manifestly is upon 

 an alphabet cognate with the Phoenician. We are unable to trace its progres- 

 sive adaptation from the scanty literal signs of early Semitic writing ; as we 

 first find it, in an advanced stage of maturation, in an inscription on the 

 Kapurcligiri rock in the Peshawar valley (lat. 34° 20' ? long. 72° 12'), where it 

 embodies the substance of the edicts of Asoka, whose corresponding mani- 

 festoes in the Indian-Pali character are so largely distributed over the continent 

 of India, 5 and the general date of whose incision may be approximatively fixed 

 at 246 B.C. 6 . How much further south this character may have penetrated at 

 this period we have no direct evidence to show, but it is to be remarked that 

 the same king Asoka simultaneously retains the Indian proper alphabet in his 

 monumental inscriptions at Khizrabad 7 and at Khalsi, 8 near the debouchement 



5. Rock Inscriptions :— 1. Girnar, in Guzerat. 2. Khalsi, on the! Upper Jumna. 

 3. Dhauli, in Cuttack. 4. Naugaum, in Ganjam. 5. Bhabra, in Jaipur, 



Monolithic inscriptions :— 1. Khizrabad, on the Upper Jumna. 2.' Meerut 

 (both moved to Delhi). 3. Allahabad. 4. Eadhia, in Sarun. 5. Mattiah in 

 the same locality. 3 



6. " Jonrn. Royal Asiatic Soc," xx. 101 ; « Prinsep's Essays," ii. 15, et sea 



7. "Prinsep's Essays," ii. 324. J 5 ' 2 ' 



8. f < Journ. As. Soc. Bengal/' 1862, p. 99. 



. 



