Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages c8.s4.t1.2

c8.s4.t1.2

The epigraphic material in Marathi is the most abundant and best-documented among the NIA languages. The principal reference sources are Master's brief anthology of sixteen inscriptions and Tuḷpuḷe's larger though by no means exhaustive compilation of seventy-six texts. Diskalkar (132) estimates a total of some three hundred inscriptions in Marathi, of which about two hundred are from Maharashtra proper and the rest from neighboring territories, mainly Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. Marathi first began to appear in inscriptions around the eleventh century a.d.,⁶⁹ and Marathi inscriptions became especially common in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when the language was widely used by the Yādavas of Devagiri and the Śilāhāras of northern Konkan (see CII 6) for their inscriptions. Marathi continued to be used epigraphically in the later medieval period, for instance in the records of the Ādil Shāhīs, and even into the European period; an interesting late (a.d. 1803) Marathi inscription is the long history of the Tanjore Marathas inscribed on the wall of the Bṛhadīśvara temple in Tañjāvur (V. Srinivansachari and S. Gopalan, *Bhoṁsle Vaṁśa Caritra*).