36 G. H. Damant— Note on the old Manipuri Character. [No. 1, 
they are likely to give, may ultimately turn out to be of little use. There 
is no doubt, however, that the pointed letters, some of which resemble the 
Y and E of the English alphabet, must belong to a very ancient age, and it 
would be interesting to trace the people who engraved them. The letters 
are big and deeply cut. 
Tradition attributes the rocks on the Mundesvari hill to a Daitya, by 
the name of Munda. He was the brother of Chanda, the chief who founded 
Chyapur. They belonged to a race of Pre-Aryans, who must have latter¬ 
ly blended their own worship of the phallus with that of the S'akti. The 
remains of their forts and stone buildings incontestably point out that the 
Daityas, who at times established sovereign sway over the Aryans, were not 
mere savages. Hated and dreaded as their names may appear, they were 
certainly powerful princes who represented a more advanced state of civili¬ 
zation than history has yet been ready to assign them. The history of 
these primitive races, detested by the names of Dakas, Daityas, Dasyus, the 
raw-eaters and the “ Black race”, remains yet to be written, and in the 
relics of their ruined forts, tenrples, pillars, scattered along the plains and hills 
of Shahabad and the valleys along the Ganges, some material may be gathered 
to show that they were not entirely men of that degraded condition in 
which their antagonists have invariably depicted them. Mr. Thomason’s 
remarks regarding the Bhar tribe equally apply to the other aborigines of 
the district: “ They were a powerful and industrious people, as is evident 
by the large works they have left behind them.” 
Note on the old Manipuri Character. — JBy G. H. Damant, C. S., Officiating 
Political Agent , Manipur. 
(With two plates.) 
There can be but little doubt that this aljuhabet is a form of the Deva- 
nagari, and it was in all probability introduced from Bengal along with 
Hinduism by some wandering sanyasi in the reign of Charairongba, who 
flourished about 1700 A. D.; at least there is no evidence to show that a 
knowledge of writing existed among the Manipuris at any earlier date. The 
earliest MS. I can find, purports to have been composed in the reign of Cha¬ 
rairongba, and there are no mural inscriptions of old date in the country. 
The alphabet is singularly ill-adapted to the Manipuri language, and in 
point of fact, we find in the MSS. that the letters g , gh, chh,j,jh, all the 
gutturals, n d, dh , b, bh, g, and sh are seldom, if ever, used except in words of 
Bengali origin, Jc, t,p, and ch being used for g, d, b, andy respectively, while 
