Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages c11.s2.19

c11.s2.19

The year 1888 also marked the publication (in October) of the first fascicle of the *Epigraphia Indica* (EI). The EI was initially conceived as a sort of supplement to CII; James Burgess, the editor, states in his preface, "This volume is thus to be regarded as properly one of the series of the *Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum*, and practically may stand as the fourth volume of that publication" (vi). The purpose of the EI was to facilitate the prompt publication of newly discovered inscriptions, since the compilation of the volumes of the CII was already proving to be a far more complex and time-consuming project than originally foreseen. But here, too, as in the case of the CII itself, the original plan for the EI proved to be overly modest; and it soon became clear that, rather than being a sort of ancillary to the CII, the EI was to take on an independent and continuing life of its own. Publication of the journal, originally conceived as a quarterly, was at first somewhat sporadic, so that the first volume was not completed until 1892; but from the third volume on, the EI was regularly issued as a biennial in eight quarterly parts.¹¹⁹ The remaining years of the nineteenth century saw the publication of the first five volumes of EI under the editorship of Burgess (vols. 1 and 2) and Hultzsch (vols. 3–5), containing articles by many scholars, most prolific among whom were Fleet, Hultzsch, G. Bühler, and F. Kielhorn. The high standards maintained in these early volumes made EI the premier epigraphic journal, although IA, JBBRAS, and other journals continued to print important articles in this field. With these developments, the last two decades of the nineteenth century constituted a sort of classical age in the study of Indian epigraphy, in which publications were characterized by both great quantity and excellent scholarship.