The Coinage of the Gupta Empire and its Imitations c19.88

c19.88

The first three letters on the right hand side are *pravaraḥ*. Hoernle had taken the word as *pravīraḥ*; there is a mark above *va*, looking like that of short medial *i*, but not like that of long medial *ī*. There is no such word as *pravīraḥ* in Sanskrit, and the reading *pravīraḥ* will go against the metre, as we shall soon see. The new photograph shows that Hoernle’s reading of the last two letters as *gupta* is untenable; the first letter is clearly a *ksha*, the subscript *sha* being distinct, and the last letter is a *ta* and not *pta*.