Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages c11.33

c11.33

In the following three decades the study of Indian inscriptions continued at a slow but steady pace, without any major breakthroughs. We find in the pages of volumes 12 through 20 (1816–30) of AR sporadic publications of Sanskrit inscriptions, mostly of the medieval period, by such scholars as W. Price, A. Stirling, E. Fell, R. Jenkins, E. C. Ravenshaw, and especially H. H. Wilson.²¹ Although the earliest Indian scripts remained undeciphered in this period, the knowledge of the many varieties of Brāhmī-derived local scripts was gradually being filled in; Wilson, for example, first published and translated a copper plate inscription in the central Indian box-headed script (see 2.2.5.3) in AR 15 (1825), 499–515, with the assistance of a Jain scholar named Sri Verma Suri, who had evidently mastered various early scripts in the course of his service under Colin Mackenzie. The latter's collection of several thousand²² stone and copper plate inscriptions in Sanskrit and Dravidian languages in southern India was among the important epigraphic activities in this period, along with those of James Tod, who collected many medieval Sanskrit inscriptions from Rajasthan and published translations of some of them (by the Jain Yati Jñānacandra) in his *Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan*.