The Antiquities of Orissa v2.c16.117.3

v2.c16.117.3

The sixth, in Prinsep's version, is "having an army of undaunted courage", but his reading is not correct, and his translation is necessarily wrong. To Europeans, raids and looting cannot but convey an offensive idea, but Indian writers invariably associate the idea of greatness with extensive conquest (*digvijaya*) and always assign it to their great kings as a mark of praise. The meaning of the seventh is clear enough, but Prinsep has transferred the case-mask to the next word, and thereby made the epithet *kaliṅgādhipa* stand by itself, unconnected grammatically with the word it qualifies. The two letters which form the mark are indistinct; in my cast they may be read *tina* or *tera*; I take them for the former for the sake of grammatical construction. Prinsep, reading them with the following letter, made out the word *tirāsi*, eighty-three. The letter *si* is clear enough, but it is not repeated to support Prinsep's reading of the subsequent word *sikhara*, of which the *kha* and *ra* are barely legible. I propose, therefore, to read the last two words *sikhara*, 'hill', in the object case, and the participle *avalonam*, 'excavated', from the Sanskrit *avaluna*, combined by synizesis into *sikharāvalonam*, meaning the hill was excavated by him, leaving the number of caves undefined.