Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages c10.s2.1

c10.s2.1

Ideally, the published edition of an Because inscriptional texts tend, to a greater or lesser degree, to be formulaic and stereotyped, missing or uncertain sections of the relative ease with which they could be forged (Fleet, 211–2). Dozens of cases of forged, spurious, or altered copper plate inscriptions have been authoritatively identified; Fleet’s list (214–23) contains fifty Spurious grants can usually be detected by the presence of various kinds of anomalies and anachronisms: paleographic and orthographic, linguistic and stylistic, historical, or calendrical (Fleet, 202–3 and 209–11). The most obvious mark of a spurious record is paleographic characteristics which are incompatible with the ostensible date of the record. Although paleographic dating is far from a precise technique (see 5.4.1), in many cases the script is so obviously inappropriate as to raise serious doubts, as in the case of a Western Gaṅga charter from Tañjāvur (Tanjore) dated Śaka 169 = A.D. 248, whose script according to Fleet (EI 3, 161) belongs to the tenth century. In some cases the forger may attempt to imitate archaic script forms, but such efforts are usually fairly transparent. Gross incompetence in orthography (though it sometimes appears in legitimate records) may also be an indication of spuriousness, as in the case of the forged Sūnahar grant of Vijayacandra discussed previously, whose orthography is so poor as to render it nearly incomprehensible in places (EI 35, 153–4).