]$3?.] Facsimiles of Ancient Inscriptions. 681 



sion of the Buddhist faith to that remarkable point of the Malay Pen- 

 insula. I cannot venture to put together any connected sentences or 

 even words, but some of the letters, the g, /, h, p, s, y, &c. can be 

 readily recognized ; as well as many of the vowel marks. 



" On a tongue of land forming the termination of the right bank of 

 the river at Singapore, now called Artillery Point, stands a stone or 

 rock of coarse red sandstone, about ten feet high, from two to five 

 feet thick, and about nine or ten feet in length, somewhat wedge- 

 shaped with weather-worn cells. The face sloping to the south-east 

 at an angle of 76° has been smoothed down in the form of an irregular 

 square, presenting a space of about thirty-two square feet, having a 

 raised edge all around. 



On this surface an inscription has originally been cut of about fifty 

 lines, but the characters are so obliterated by the weather, that the 

 greater part of them are illegible. Still there are many left which are 

 plain enough, more particularly those at the lower right hand corner, 

 where the raised edge of the stone has in some measure protected them. 



Having frequently made pilgrimages to this rock, and as often 

 regretted that its present weather-worn condition hid from us a 

 tale, of " the days of other years," I determined if it were possible, 

 to save a few letters, could they be satisfactorily made out, to tell 

 us something however small, of the language or the people who 

 inscribed it, and hence eke out our limited and obscure knowledge of 

 the Malayan peninsula. 



These considerations however strong, were very apt to give way, 

 when it was almost universally known, that many had attempted to 

 decipher the writing in question, and had failed to make any thing 

 of it, among whom was, one of great eminence and perseverance, the 

 late Sir S. Raffles. Courage was nevertheless taken, and with the 

 assistance of a clever native writer, to work we went, and the follow- 

 ing method was adopted to insure correctness. 



A learned friend of mine suggested, that well made and soft dough, 

 ought to be tried, for even school-boys used it for taking impressions 

 from seals : it was tried accordingly and found to answer well, and 

 when the impression of one character was taken and copied, the letter 

 itself in the stone was painted exactly over with white lead, as far as 

 the eye could make it out, when the character was copied a second 

 time, and if the two agreed, it was considered as nearly correct as 

 possible, and although this was done to all the characters, it was more 

 particularly attended to in the more obscure ones, for the letters 



