478 
JOURNAL OF AN EMBASSY 
mous number of stone inscriptions, from Sa- 
gaing, from Pugan, from San-ku, a place about 
three days’ journey beyond Ava, and Ang-le- 
y wa, in the country of the Shans—places which 
contain many relics of antiquity. I counted 
these, and found they amounted to no less than 
two hundred and sixty. A few of these in¬ 
scriptions are on marble slabs, but the greater 
number on good sandstone : they are all of the 
form which I have already described: the cha¬ 
racter is occasionally the old Pali, but more fre¬ 
quently the common round Burman ;—the wri¬ 
ting, in both cases, is in very good preservation. 
Such inscriptions as these are only employed to 
commemorate the founding of temples of the 
first importance; and the frequency of them, 
in past times, may be estimated from the extra¬ 
ordinary assemblage of inscriptions here brought 
together. 
To satisfy the curiosity of my reader, I shall 
give, in the Appendix, two of these inscrip¬ 
tions as they were translated for me by my 
friend Mr. Judson. They are, as usual with all 
such productions, mystical and puerile. The 
only merit which can be said to belong to Bur¬ 
mese inscriptions is, that they all contain dates, 
with some remote allusion to historical events, 
and that they afford some slender illustrations 
