Indian Palaeography c17.s3.2

c17.s3.2

A. (i) In the first group falls the badly preserved Vo-Canh inscription (Pl. XX. 1) which refers to a king called Śrīmāra. To this inscription have been assigned various dates ranging from the second to the fourth century a.d. The advocates of the earlier date point to the tripartite form of the subscript *ya*. But this form was preserved in Gujarat as late as the middle of the fifth century a.d., as is attested in the Junagadh rock inscription of Skanda Gupta (Pl. XIV*b*. 1). D. C. Sircar¹ argues for a later date, as the record is in Sanskrit. But this argument is hardly valid when it is realized that Sanskrit was generally used in the records of the Western Kshatrapas from the middle of the second century a.d. onwards. We will first analyse the letters before assigning a date.