The Antiquities of Orissa v2.c16.s3.t2.38

v2.c16.s3.t2.38

The edicts were of general interest as they concerned the whole Buddhist community of India to whom they were addressed. But the purport of the separate proclamations was entirely local, and bore only the inhabitants of the town where they were promulgated. The locale was Tosalī, which occurs in Ptolemy’s tables as the city of *Tosale*. Wilford takes it to be the same with the *Tosala Kosalaka* on the authority of the *Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa*, and that, in the *Vārāhi Saṃhitā*, is held to be the same with *Kośalaka* or *Kośala*, which the Purāṇas place “behind the Vindhya mountains,” even as Ptolemy has *Tosale metropoles* “on the other side of the Ganges”,⁶⁶ somewhere “near the mountains inhabited by the *Nangologe*”, which Prinsep imagines to be “the *Nāgas* or *Nāgaloka* of the eastern mountains.”⁶⁷ This identification is scarcely admissible. The locale we have to look for should be in the neighbourhood of the rock on which the inscription occurs, and not in the eastern mountains. We know for certain that at one time the Nāgas lived in different parts of India, and were not confined, as at present, to the east of Bengal. It is certain too that the Kośala here meant is not the Province noticed in the *Rāmāyaṇa*, as the kingdom of the hero of that epic. That Tosalī is the same with Kośala is very probable, as in an inscription of Yajāti Keśarī of the 5th century, we find a place near Cuttack named *Dakṣiṇa Kośala* or South Kośala, which we may fairly assume to be the locale named.