1837.] from the West of India. 1043 



and the language is not Sanskrit, but a link between that grammatical 

 idiom and the Pali of the Buddhist scriptures. The alphabet appears 

 to be the very prototype of all the Devandgari and Dakshini alphabets : 

 and nothing in the pure Sanskrit tongue has yet been discovered pre- 

 served in this character : indeed it would be impossible that it should ; 

 because, still more than the Pali, the alphabet is deficient in many let- 

 ters absolutely necessary to Sanskrit syntax. 



Further, of the cave inscriptions on this part of India, we have already 

 published one from Gaya in the selfsame alphabet and language, of 

 the age of raja Dasaratha (the II.) In the present number we pub- 

 lish another equally important evidence from Cuttack, proving that 

 the caves in the Khandgiri hill were repaired and appropriated, if not 

 excavated, in the time of Aira raja a Buddhist sovereign of Calinga. 

 From the west of India we have hitherto only had one specimen (that 

 of Dr. Stevenson from Karli) to deal with, and this we have with rea- 

 son suspected of being also Pdli, though the character has evidently 

 undergone the changes of a century or two. 



Whatever may be our desire to penetrate further into the secret, 

 we still by no means regret that Col. Sykes has not sent the whole 

 of his collection to gratify our curiosity. Impressed with a convic- 

 tion that no written copy is to be trusted implicitly we should have 

 either hesitated to look at them at all, or perhaps should have wasted 

 hours of labour in vain on them ; while we know that our zealous fellow- 

 labourers in Bombay are meantime adopting the best means of secur- 

 ing authentic facsimiles of these very inscriptions, and are even now 

 engaged in examining their contents. Nevertheless these half-dozen 

 brief specimens from Jooneer, selected as containing symbols identical 

 with those on the various Buddhist groupes of coins, have, invited atten- 

 tion in spite of all our resolutions ! and though future comparisons may 

 change and correct many letters in our reading, we cannot refrain from 

 publishing the results, strikingly confirmatory as they are of the 

 fact that these Buddhist cave inscriptions are also in the vernacular 

 of the day, all equally simple and intelligible — now that the key has 

 been discovered. This key is of course no other than the one reco- 

 vered through the Bhilsa ddnams S and it is a singular fact that the 

 principal deviation in the Sainhadri cave alphabet, from what may be 

 considered as the original type, (namely, that of the letter d,) has been 

 traced and verified through the recurrence, in many of the short in- 

 scriptions, of the somewhat similar expression daya dhama, (Sanskrit 

 dayd-dharma.J The principal acts here are of ' compassion and piety, 

 as those were of ' charity ;' not that the latter expression does not 



