The Historical Inscriptions of Southern India (collected till 1923) and Outlines of Political History c7.48

c7.48

¹ The discovery of the Aśōka Edicts at Maski, otherwise Māsangi and even Piriya Māsangi, Kan. for bigger Māsangi, raises the possibility that Aśōka had a viceroyalty corresponding to the land of Kuntala, the Southern Mahrata country, so called. Maski is in a gold producing district and the edicts were actually discovered in prospecting for gold. The probability of a viceroyalty in this region becomes the more since the Tamils, in their classical literature, locate the northern (Vaḍuga) frontier (Vaḍugar-Munai) somewhere about this region. The existence of a place called Kanakagiri, about twenty miles across Hampi, the site of the old Vijayanagar, makes it probably enough the seat of the viceroyalty; the more so, as some of the Aśōka Edicts were found further south in Mysore, and more recently to the eastwards at Gooty. The Mysore edicts happen to be addressed to the Governor of a division named Isila. Isila seems to be the Prakrit equivalent of Riṣyaka, and in the region of Hampi there is a Riṣyamukha Parvata, and the division might well have gone by that name, Isila being almost the exact equivalent in Prakrit, or Pāli, or the Sanskrit Riṣyaka. In later epigraphs, almost in the same region, some chieftains claim to have belonged to Vāli Vamśa, which seems to indicate that the tradition that Hampi was the kingdom of Kishkinda was kept alive in the tenth and eleventh centuries A.D. (Ep. Ind. xiii, 186-87). So the location of Suvarṇagiri either at Kanakagiri or somewhere near seems quite probable.—Editor.