1088 Note on Inscriptions from [Dice. 



philological and mythological ; namely, that between the Hindu god- 

 dess Ira', and the Juno of the Greeks " Hpa" or Hera*. The name is 

 not only identical, but to both, though not precisely in the same man- 

 ner is applied, in western and eastern fable, the decision of the question 

 which could not otherwise be solved of the comparative pleasure to 

 male and female in the conjugal union. Again, the son of Zeus and 

 Hera is Ares, " Ap^s," or Mars; a name for which, Keightley 

 asserts, no satisfactory derivation has yet been given. Now this word 

 is almost identical with ^^ Air as or Ailasf the direct patronymic of 

 XK1 Ira* or Ila', and the name constantly employed in the Purdnas 

 to designate Pururavas, the celebrated lover of the heavenly nymph 

 Urvasi, whose tale is told in the Vishnu and Padma Purdnas, and 

 more pathetically in Kalida's's play of Vikram-urvasi, lately trans- 

 lated by Professor Wilson. 



Puru'ravas or Ailas was the first monarch of the seven-fold earth J, 

 and hence might be as well entitled to be called king of Kalinga as of 

 every other country. We may therefore understand in the opening 

 passage of the inscription, — ' these mountain caverns were excavated 

 by Ailas, the great king, the cloud-supported, the lord of Kalinga,' 

 — no more than an allusion to the same tradition of the origin of 

 these caves as that which prevails at Ellore ; coupled with the other 

 local tradition, related by Stirling, that the whole of the rocky hills 

 of Udaya and Khandgiri, were conveyed thither from the peaks of the 

 Himalaya, the headquarters of Puru'ravas' earthly dominion, so well 

 pictured in the poetic fiction of his cloud-borne chariot. 



Stripped of its mythological and poetical dress, we may understand 

 by the passage that the caves were natural chasms worn in the 

 mountains by the action of the winds and the waves ; for ird signifies 

 * water, the ocean ;' as airdvata, or airdvana, ' the ocean born,' is the 

 elephant of Indra the god of the heavens, the atmosphere, whose 

 name is still preserved in the sculptures at Ellora§. 



* Keightley derives Upa, from hera the Latin for ' mistress !' others deduce it 

 from aer the air and erao to love, hoth equally unsatisfactory. 



f The daughters of Juno are hy Homer entitled the Eileilhyice, in which the r is 

 changed to I ? 



X " The holy Buddha begot by lLA'a son (Puru'ravas) who performed by his 

 own might a hundred aswamedhas. He worshipped Vishnu on the peaks of Himalaya 

 and thence became the monarch of the seven-fold earth." Extract of the Matsya 

 pur&na, Wilson's Hindu drama, Vol. I. page 191,— -English Edition. 



§ In looking at Malet's account in the sixth volume of the Researches, I per- 

 ceive one of the Ellora caves is called Doomar Leyna. In this name we may satisfac- 

 torilyr ecognize the Una or lona of the Khandyiri inscriptions — the word should, I 

 presume, be read Dharma lunam ^Wt «T the excavation of Dharma, having a gigantic 



