308 
Rajendralala Mitra —On a Skanda Gupta Inscription. [No. 4, 
traveller was therefore thrown away. I have lately had the Arabic passage 
examined by Mr. Blochmann than whom few can speak more authoritatively 
on the subject, and he has favoured me with the following note on the 
subject, and this I think may be accepted as quite decisive on the subject 
as to the weight to be attached to the remark of Abu Raihan in the form 
in which we now have it. He says, 
“ The whole passage is as corrupt as can he, and the word about which 
you are most doubtful contains in Cunningham’s lines a misprint. The 
misprint is which should be q\ urriklia ; in the first line we have to 
read for.Besides, Cunningham has ‘ Ballabh-Kal,’ instead of 
‘Ballabh kana,’ ‘ Ballabh was.’ The passage thus far corrected is— 
r^i ■ ■^ A5 I 
but still, the Arabic and the sentence itself are bad. Abu Raihan cannot 
tlius have written it. 
Translation. 
“ As regards the Guptakal, they were, as is related, a people wicked 
and powerful ; and when they were cut off, it was dated in them (the era 
commenced ?), and apparently Ballab was the last of them (or after them). 
The beginning of their era likewise comes after the Shakakal 241. 
“As it is, I can see no fault in Reinaud’s translation. I wonder what 
Dr. Sachau of Vienna has found in the MSS. which he has just now been 
collating.” 
To argue upon such a passage and to torture other documents to con¬ 
form to it is by no means commendable. Had it been otherwise, still the 
argument that a love of euphemism, or a desire to avoid “ the hazard of 
popular prejudice” had led to the use of s'anta and bhulcta in the inscriptions 
would appear futile at best. Instead of its not being “ singular,” it would 
be in the last degree singular “ that a direct encomium should be bestowed 
on a potentate” who, “ however truculently he may have once lorded it, had 
become dust and ashes for nearly a century and a half.” As “ to impulses 
of family pride” the family being extinct for so long a time, there was 
none to be guided by such impulses, and it would no doubt be a most 
extraordinary phenomenon in political history, if popular prejudice could 
be irritated by calling a king, however great or popular he might have 
been when living, dead a hundred and forty-one years after the extermin¬ 
ation of his dynasty. To use Mr. Hall’s language, “ the idea would be pre¬ 
posterous.” 
The Arabic authority, however, apart, I am clearly of opinion that the 
translations hitherto published of the first stanza of the Kuhaon pillar 
