1880.] H. Rivett-Carnac— 0« Clay Discs called " Spindle Whorls." 135 



law given in that work. And it is almost unnecessary to point out the 

 resemblance which the highly ornamented Disc No. 7 bears to this sketch. 

 The other discs, though not so elaborately ornamented, seem to adopt 

 the same idea. No. 11, as far as ornamentation is concerned, undoubtedly 

 resembles a wheel, though, as the section will show, it can never have been 

 used, as some of my friends have suggested, as the wheel of a toy cart ; 

 nor indeed are there any marks of wear on any of the wheel-shaped discs 

 to support the view that they were used for miniature playthings of this 

 description. It seems much more probable that they were votive offer- 

 ings intended to represent, more or less the Buddhist wheel of the law, 

 similar to that stamped on some of the coins recently submitted by me to 

 the Society. 



The view that these were indeed votive offerings, and not toy cart 

 wheels or pachisi or draughtsmen, as some have suggested, is further borne 

 out by the large numbers of clay discs, of a somewhat similar type, but 

 bearing on them the well known Buddhist formula, found in the same 

 neighbourhood. Tliese seals, as they have sometimes been called, from their 

 bearing a seal-like impress, have been figured by Moor in his Hindu Pan- 

 theon and have been described by General Cunningham, by Dr. Kajen- 

 dralala Mitra, C. I, E. and others. General Cunningham, if I remember 

 riglit, found large quantities of such " seals" made of lac in the Buddhist 

 ruins of Behar. Though my stay at Sankisa was short, I succeeded in ob- 

 taining a considerable number of these seals. Many of them are from the 

 same stamp. Others from different moulds bear the same well known for- 

 mula commencing "^e dJiarma hetavoy The character of the legend in all 

 these cases is comparatively modern. Those, however, marked 1 and 2 

 Plate XV bear the formula in the Gupta character. Others again marked 

 3 to 6 are deserving of notice from the variety of their ornamentation. 

 They would seem all to have been made and stamped, in what I may call, a 

 cuihion-like fashion, after the manner of the quaintly-shaped Mitra coins 

 recently submitted by me to the Society. Some of these seals are I think 

 worthy of being figured in the Society's Journal. 



There can be little doubt that these so-called seals, bearing the Buddhist 

 formula, are votive offerings. A friend of mine, Mrs. Murray- Aynsley who 

 recently travelled through a portion of Ladakh, brought me thence two 

 stones, one inscribed with a portion of the Buddhist Formula, Plate XV, 

 No. 7, the other bearing a conventional ornamentation. That these stones 

 are offered in the present day, will be seen from the following extract from 

 Mrs. Murray-Aynsley's work entitled " Our Visit to Hindostan, Kashmir 

 and Ladakh," p. 88. 



" "We there first saw some of the walls called Manes, which are form- 

 ed of stones placed one upon the other without any mortar, and are 



