365 
1874.] Rajendralala Mitra —On a Slcanda Gupta Inscription . 
Gupta dynasty, or from its extinction, but from the reign of the seventh 
prince of that line. This would leave the first six princes out of the pale 
of the era, and the dates given in their inscriptions must, therefore, belong 
to the Samvat, the S'aka, or some other era current at their times. 
Such a conclusion, however startling, would not be at first sight impro¬ 
bable. The record is inscribed by order of a private person, and he had 
perfect right in choosing the era in which he should date his grant, and as 
a Gupta era is known to have been current in India at one time, we may 
assume this to be the same. Skanda Gupta was a more renowned sovereign 
than STi Gupta, or Gupta, the founder of his house, and there is nothing 
improbable in his founding an era, or in the idea of that era being in currency 
for a hundred and forty-six years from the date of his accession to the throne 
of his ancestors, or of its being known as the Gupta-kala. The fact of its 
having got currency after the fall of six of the Gupta sovereigns would also 
in a loose way justify the statement of the Arabian traveller that it com¬ 
menced after the fall of the Guptas. 
The assumption on the strength of which all these inferences may be 
drawn cannot, however, be maintained. The manner in which the name of 
Skanda Gupta is introduced is quite inconsistent with such an idea. In all 
ancient and mediaeval Indian inscriptions where kings are especially named 
to indicate their eras, the personal names appear simply, or with a single 
regal title, barely enough to point out their identity, and that at the end ; 
whereas in the monument under notice we have it put prominently at the 
beginning with a large number of titles, and qualified with epithets in the 
present tense, such as would be appropriate for a reigning potentate, and 
exactly in the same way in which the names of kings occur in the two 
records of Hastin, noticed in the thirtieth volume of this Journal (pp. 6 and 
10) and in the monuments of Eran. # I am therefore strongly disposed to 
believe that the name in the inscription now under examination has been 
used with the same object which was prevalent in the minds of the writers 
in the other records, i. e ., to indicate the reigning sovereign and as a mark 
of loyalty, and not to define the era. It would follow as a matter of 
course that the word rajya in the record should be raj ye , i. e., it is not in 
its crude form as forming a part of a compound term, but in the locative 
case. 
This assumption of mine would be in perfect keeping with the Kuha- 
cn pillar inscription in which Skanda Gupta is described as reigning in 
the month of Jyeshtha following the year 141 of an unnamed era, probably 
the same which in the records of king Hastin is described as included in 
the reign of the Guptas,f and which occurs without any specification in 
* Ante VI., and XXX. p. 14. 
t Ante XXX., pp. 6-10. 
