Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages c6.3

c6.3

It has been authoritatively estimated¹ that something like 80 percent of our knowledge of the history of India before about A.D. 1000 is derived from inscriptional sources.² Without inscriptions, for example, we would have only the vaguest notion of the history of the Gupta dynasty, the greatest northern Indian empire of the classical period. But the importance of epigraphy goes beyond historical studies in the narrower sense of the term, that is, political history. The modern study of most aspects of the cultural history of traditional India, such as the arts, literature, religion, and language, are also heavily indebted to inscriptions for their basic chronological and geographical framework. Again reflecting the non-historical orientation of traditional Indian culture as a whole, traditional literary and cultural relics typically seem to exist in a chronological vacuum; for example, the date of original composition of literary texts, especially in the earlier centuries, is rarely recorded in the works themselves (although later manuscript copies are often dated). Thus the dates and even the relative chronologies of major cultural developments are often uncertain or totally unknown. But here again inscriptional material, with its vast volume and diversity of contents, frequently comes to the rescue. In the history of literature, for example, inscriptional allusions to and imitations of great classical poets, as well as original compositions preserved in epigraphic form, provide a bedrock of evidence for the chronological development of Sanskrit poetic literature.³ The same holds true, to a greater or lesser extent, for nearly all branches of Indology;⁴ in the words of D. C. Sircar, “there is no aspect of the life, culture and activities of the Indians that is not reflected in inscriptions.”⁵ Thus epigraphic materials, directly or indirectly, provide almost the only solid chronological foundation for modern historically oriented studies. This is true primarily because inscriptions, unlike literary sources, which almost always come to us only after being copied and recopied through the centuries, are inherently datable, either by an explicit date or by paleographic estimate.⁶ A reference to a particular legal principle, religious sect, philosopher, poet, and so on, in an inscription thus gives at least an approximate terminus ante quem for a person or event whose date might otherwise (i.e., from literary sources alone) be impossible to determine even in the broadest estimate.