Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages c10.s3.t2.8

c10.s3.t2.8

Unless, as is occasionally the case, such regnal dates are accompanied by a second date in an established era, they do not by themselves provide an absolute date for the record. Such regnally dated inscriptions must therefore be subjected to the same techniques of dating by paleographic or other methods as are applied to undated inscriptions. It is often possible, however, to establish approximate or occasionally even exact values for such dates by means of historical synchronizations for the rulers concerned. Thus in the case of the regnally dated Aśokan inscriptions, reasonably accurate absolute dates have been established by the synchronization of Aśoka's regnal years with the contemporary Greek kings to whom he refers in his rock edict XIII (see 4.3.1.1 and 7.1.1.1). Among the regnally dated inscriptions of various dynasties of the early Christian era and later, we often have a fair number of records of successive rulers on the basis of which a dynastic succession list can be drawn up. The relative chronology of the dynasty can then often be correlated with known absolute dates; thus the regnal dates of the Vākāṭakas can be established with fair precision on the basis of their relations with the Guptas, and the Pālas can be approximately dated by their interactions with the Gurjara-Pratīhāras and Rāṣṭrakūṭas. (In each of these cases, of course, the latter-mentioned dynasty dated its records in known historical eras.) Even where such historical synchronizations are not available, paleographic dating may be applied as a supplementary technique, and when we have a sequence of regnally dated records of a particular dynasty this method is considerably more reliable than when applied to a single record or a few isolated records.