Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages c8.s4.t2.5

c8.s4.t2.5

Most Oriya inscriptions are the usual donative stone records and copper plate charters. The early ones were written in “Gauḍī” or “Proto-Bengali” script, which gradually developed into a distinct Oriya script from the fourteenth century onward. Oriya inscriptions were also sometimes written in the Devanāgarī (e.g., Tripathi, *Evolution*, 248–9) or Telugu (ibid., 229–31) scripts. Like the Marathi inscriptions, many of them are bilingual (or trilingual), but the proportion of inscriptions in Oriya alone is larger than for Marathi. The multilingual records include inscriptions in Oriya together with Sanskrit and/or Telugu, Tamil (e.g., Bhubaneswar stone ins., EI 32, 229–38), and Hindi (e.g., Baripadā Museum stone ins., OHRJ 2, 94–8).