W. Hoey —Set Mahet. 
1 *> 
l u 
the sun, who paused to gaze upon her beauty. The king, finding it still 
day, ate his dinner and washed his hands. The young lady came down, 
and it suddenly grew dark. The king expressed his wonder, and liis 
queen told him how the beauty of his younger brother’s wife had de¬ 
tained the passing sun. Fired with passion, he said: “ I must see 
her.” The queen said : “ You cannot see your younger brother’s wife.” 
The young princess, who was true to her husband, and as modest and 
chaste as she was beautiful, said that the city would be ruined if he 
dared to violate her. She went again to the eminence where she had 
first held the sun spell-bound, and the king determined to pursue her. 
She implored the sun for aid, and he darted a ray upon the king which 
burned him and turned the city upside down. 
This curious legend is locally attached to some unknown member 
of the dynasty of Suhil Deo, sovereign of Kosala at the time of Saiyad 
Salar’s expedition, and some ignorant persons narrate it as an expla¬ 
nation of the desolation of Set Mahet, and, converting the name into 
Set met (in the sense of ‘ topsj T -turvy ’), add to the legend how the city 
was turned upside down. Mr. Benett attaches special value to the legend 
as showing that the king alluded to was a Jain, ‘ the inability to eat after 
sunset, which is the point on which the whole turns, being derived, 
from the Jain reluctance to sacrifice insect life.’ Mr. Benett also places 
this occurrence at about forty years after the invasion of this kingdom 
by Salar Mas‘fid, and thinks it points to ‘the conquest of the country by 
‘the first of the great Rathor kings of Kanauj, Sri Chandradeva, in the 
‘ last half of the eleventh century, when he made a pilgrimage to 
‘ Ajodhia, Kosala, etc.’ 
I think that the germ of this legend lies in the history of 
Virudhaka. The point on which Mr. Benett lays stress, the regard for 
insect life, is characteristic of the Buddhists equally with the Jains. 
Thus, the eating by lamplight, being a forbidden custom, is not conclu¬ 
sive for a Jain connection of the legend. The supposition of an 
invasion by the Rathor king of Kanauj is only a guess and, as far as 
I know, a gratuitous guess : and the Jain faith was certainly flourishing 
at Sravasti half a century after Suhil Deo’s death, for the finest statues 
of Mahavira, which have been discovered by me at Somnath, bear in¬ 
scriptions of the donor dated 1133 Samvat. How could they have 
escaped in a siege and sack ? Besides it is more than probable that his 
dynasty ended with Suhil Deo, who fell in conflict with Salar Mas 4 ud’s 
force : and the tomb at Mahet on the site of the king’s palace is that 
of the Kotwal left at Mahet by the invading Moslems. 
It will be remembered that Virudhaka conceived the notion 
of exterminating the Sakyas because of an insult put upon him when he 
