Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c20.s2.t2.2

c20.s2.t2.2

The cave was discovered in 1894 by Fawcett, the Superintendent of Police, Malabar District. He visited the cave several times more in the next two years and made careful drawings and took photographs of the rock carvings and inscriptions. He transmitted the photographs to Hultzsch, the Government Epigraphist, for his comments on the inscriptions. Hultzsch made immediate arrangements for taking estampages of the inscriptions and published a brief note (without illustrations) on the discovery.¹ He also forwarded the estampages with his detailed comments on the inscriptions to Fawcett who incorporated them along with his own drawings and photographs in the paper published by him in 1901.² Hultzsch identified four inscriptions at Edakal as in "cave characters" (the older name for the Southern Brāhmī script).³ He read two of them, one each in Sanskrit⁴ and Tamil,⁵ and assigned them to about the end of the 5th century A.D. He declared that the other two inscriptions⁶ were "unintelligible" to him, but "decidedly archaic".