The Antiquities of Orissa v2.c16.130

v2.c16.130

[21] The next sentence continues the enumeration of the good deeds of the king. Its words are: 1st, *kaliṅga-nagari*, ‘in the city of Kaliṅga’. There is no case-mark to this compound, but Prinsep very reasonably assumes that it is in the dative case. 2nd, *khidira-sitala-taḍāga*,—*khidira*, ‘the moon’, *sitala*, ‘cool’, *taḍāya*, ‘jheel’ or ‘long artificial lake’. 3rd, *pādiya cha*, ‘and flights of steps’, from the Sanskrit *pādiya*. Prinsep reads *khidira*, ‘poor’; but the epithet poor applied to a tank appears to me to be rhetorically offensive, and I have therefore preferred a different and more consistent version. If I could accept *khidi* to be the Prākṛt form of the Sanskrit *kṣhiti*,’ ‘earth’ and *rasatala* to be the *rasātala* ‘bottom of the earth’ of the Hindu cosmogonists, the two words together would make a very appropriate epithet for *taḍāga*,—a very deep jheel, or one whose bottom reached the nether regions, but the reading *sitala* is against it. The conjunctive *cha*, which follows, couples the jheel with the flight of steps. 5th, *vathupāyani*, ‘every necessary’, or *vahupayani*, ‘many roads’. Prinsep prefers the former, but the second letter is very much worn out, and seems to me to be more like a *hu* than *tha*, and the meaning with the former letter is more in keeping with the context. 5th, *savayāna*, ‘all kinds of equipages’. 6th, *paṭisanthāpana*, ‘consecration’. The last word of the line is *cha*, ‘and’; it joins the roads with the tank mentioned before. The verb of the sentence occurs in the next line.