Indian Epigraphy c11.t6.26

c11.t6.26

The above bare outline gradually expanded into elaborate genealogies and strings of epithets in later records. We have often racy and ornate descriptions, in prose or verse or in a mixture of both, in the introduction of the donor, which cover a considerable part of his charter. The military exploits of the donor and his ancestors received special attention of the court poets who composed the said section called praśasti or eulogy and often attributed vague and imaginary achievements to the personages described. Physical charms and qualities of head and heart, sometimes real but often imaginary, were generally made the subjects of description. Thus while the Sātavāhana charters usually introduce the king's name with a metronymic but with or without any royal epithet, eleven out of the twenty four lines of writing on the Sasanakota plates, referred to above, are devoted to the introduction of the donor. After the invocation, the Jāhnaveya family and the Kāṇvāyana gotra, to which king Mādhavavarman I claimed to have belonged, and his father Koṅgaṇivarman are gradually introduced. This is followed by the donor's own name, the intervening spaces being filled up with epithets describing the father and the son. Some of these epithets are of little importance to the student of history, e. g. when the father is described as ‘one who has produced lands [inhabited by] good people by the conquests born of the impetuosity of his own arms.’ The description of king Kāntideva and his parents in the Chittagong plate consists of six ornate verses followed by a prose passage, while Dadda’s charter describes in ornate prose, in about 14 lines out of a total of about 30, not only his father or parents, but also some of his distant ancestors.