Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages c14.10

c14.10

Line 3: “walls inlaid with stone”: This follows Sircar’s interpretation (*silāvigaḍabhīcā* = Skt. *śilā-vikṛta-bhittikāḥ* = *prastara-khacitāḥ iṣṭaka-prākārāḥ*), after Fleet and Bhandarkar (for references see Hultzsch, 164 n. 3). Although as noted by Hultzsch (ibid.) the equation of *bhīcā* with **bhittikā* is problematic, this interpretation seems better than Hultzsch’s “a stone bearing a horse (?)”, reading *silā vigaḍabhī cā* as separate words. In this inscription the words are often (though not always) separated by spaces, but there are no spaces in the phrase in question, which would support the interpretation preferred here. But the phrase remains highly uncertain, and several other interpretations have been proposed (see, e.g., Bühler, 5). See also Kenneth R. Norman, “A Note on *śilavigaḍabhīcā* in Aśoka’s Rummindei Inscriptions,” in *The Buddhist Forum* 3, 1991–93 (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1994), 227–37. Line 4: “because