3862.] On some Bactro-Buddhist Belies from Bawal Pindi . 179 
as far back as the 7th century. In its simple form it must have 
been in use long before that time, and as the Jogis, as a sect, are of very 
ancient date and notices of their rigorous penances occur in books 
many centuries before the commencement of the Christian era, it 
would not be too much to suppose that the term hahsa was well 
known at the time when the Bactrians held sway in Western 
India. If this be admitted, bearing in mind the well-established 
fact of the Buddhist having borrowed most of their terminology 
from the Hindus, it would not be unreasonable to suppose that the 
duck under notice, was placed in the monument as an emblem of the 
superior intelligence of the saint whose memory it was to perpetuate. 
The inscription (Fig. 11) is in Arian characters, its language being 
Pali, similar to that of the Kapur-di-giri edicts of As'oka, and the 
Wardak record of the time of Huvishka. The letters have been 
punched on the gold leaf, and are in an excellent state of preservation, 
but several of them are peculiar in shape, and the difficulty of ascer¬ 
taining their phonetic values throws much doubt on the meaning of 
the whole record. Moreover in the Arian alphabet, as far as yet known, 
four different letters either by themselves or with their Vowel- 
marks, appear very much alike, and they constantly lead to misappre¬ 
hensions and mistakes. They are all formed of an oblique line bending 
to the left with a top stroke more or less curved. The letters alluded to 
are v, r , t, and b. Of these v perhaps is the most characteristic with its 
perfectly horizontal top line, and yet it is liable to be mistaken for an 
r ; the r is liable to be confounded with t and b, and the t has a strong 
tendency to merge into b. The l too in the first line of the Kapur-di-giri 
inscription has some resemblance to b. The v stands at the fourth 
remove from b and is not often liable to be mistaken for it, nor for a t, 
and yet when the horizontal top stroke.is modified by a perpendicular 
stroke at its end to indicate the long vowel a, nothing save the context 
is left to guide the decypherer to their values, and even that dubious 
guide fails him whenever he has an unknown proper name with any 
of these letters before him. I feel myself, therefore, in my reading of 
the record, freely open to correction, and if I publish it in its tentative 
form, it is only to provoke enquiry, and to assist the researches of others 
into a subject fraught with the deepest interest in connexion with 
the history of Bactrian domination in India. I presume not to apply 
the “verifying faculty” so as to convert the plausible into the certain. 
