Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c21.s3.t2.1

c21.s3.t2.1

Krishna Sastri was the first to compare the Tamil cave inscriptions with the Bhattiprolu casket inscriptions of Andhra.¹⁰ However, he did not correctly apply the rules of the Bhattiprolu orthography discovered earlier by Bühler.¹¹ He assumed that a character in the cave inscriptions, which resembled *nā* of the casket inscriptions, was of the "Bhattiprolu type".¹ This led him to the implausible conclusion that "the numerous words ending in *nā* in all the inscriptions may be taken to be the genitive plurals ending in *-nāṃ*",² resulting in a gross exaggeration of the "Prakrit element" in the cave inscriptions. Actually, the Bhattiprolu *nā* (or, more generally, the *-ā* medial sign of Bhattiprolu) never occurs in the Tamil-Brāhmī script. It was left to Subrahmanya Aiyer to correct the reading of *nā* to *ṉ* (the alveolar nasal which occurs only in the Tamil-Brāhmī script).³