Indian Palaeography c15.s3.t1.25

c15.s3.t1.25

(i) Pl. XI. 7 includes the inscriptions dated between the (Śaka) years 386 and 427, and Pl. XI. 8 has the inscriptions ranging between the (Śaka) years 428 and 516. Roughly speaking, no. 7 belongs to the later half of the fifth century A.D. and no. 8 to the sixth century. The manner of writing is doubtless derived from the Kauśāmbī style of the Gupta inscriptions, as the analysis of the main body of the letters will show, but the medial vowels agree with the system known from the fifth-century copper plates of Bengal. It seems therefore probable that this Kauśāmbī style reached Nepal through Bengal. But the Nepalese inscriptions have an individuality of their own quite distinct from that of Bengal. This is clearly marked in the manner of using the broad pen. In all the inscriptions in Nepal the head-mark is a well-formed solid triangle, but the Bengal copper plates show a line mark, and only the later writing has triangular heads. Again in Nepal the verticals show a definite foot-mark from the earliest inscriptions to the latest, but in Bengal it is absent. As in the inscriptions of Bengal, the Kauśāmbī style is continued here to the end of the sixth century A.D., and in fact in Nepal it survives even later, though in the Middle Ganges Valley the Western influence came in the beginning of the sixth century A.D. This Western tendency in some letters is seen in Nepal very vaguely in the first half of the seventh century A.D., but more definitely from the later half of that century. Again the ornamentation follows the style of Bengal rather than that of the Middle Ganges Valley.