Indian Epigraphy c15.t4.21

c15.t4.21

The dates found in the earliest records of the indigenous kings of India thus point to the absence of the custom of dating royal documents in the years of an era and also to the non-existence of any popular era in ancient India. There are, however, some Indian eras which have their epochs falling before the 4th century B.C. These are the Kali-yuga era of 3102 B.C., the Śrī-Harṣa era of 457 B.C. referred to by Al-Bīrūnī and the Parinirvāṇa eras of the Buddhists and the Jains. Purāṇic passages like the one giving the intervening period between the birth of Parikṣit and the accession of Mahāpadma Nanda as 1015 or 1050 or 1500² years no doubt suggest that the chroniclers of ancient Indian historical traditions attempted to base their chronological scheme on such important events as the birth of Parikṣit (placed by some authorities immediately after the battle of Kurukṣetra and at the beginning of the Kali-yuga) and the accession of the great empire-builder Mahāpadma Nanda. But the facts that the chroniclers do not always begin their computation from a point near about the supposed beginning of the Kali-yuga and that there is no uniformity among the traditions go to show that the reckoning from the starting of the Kali age (which itself belongs to the domain of mythology, the *yuga* division being unknown to very early works) was not a regular, far less a popular, era. The contemporaneity of the last Nanda king with Alexander (336-23 B.C.) and the Puranic traditions regarding the predecessors of the Mauryas suggest that Mahāpadma Nanda is not to be assigned to a period much earlier than 400 B.C. Different versions of the Puranic tradition quoted above thus place the birth of Parikṣit (and therefore the beginning of the Kali age) 1015 or 1050 or 1500 years before that date, i.e., about 1415 B.C. or 1450 B.C. or 1900 B.C. According to the evidence of the Aihole inscription¹ (634 A.D.) and certain other sources, however, the first year of the Kali-yuga corresponds to 3102-01 B.C. Another tradition, supported by authorities including Varāhamihira² and Kalhaṇa,³ says that the battle of Kurukṣetra (and therefore the birth of Parikṣit) occurred 653 years later than the beginning of the Kali age, i.e. about 2449 B.C. Thus, whatever may have been the value attached by Purāṇic chroniclers to the event of Parikṣit’s birth, there was apparently no regular and uniform reckoning from that chronological point. As to the Kali-yuga era of 3102 B.C., scholars have satisfactorily demonstrated that it is not a real historical era, but was invented by Indian astronomers for the purposes of their calculations some 35 centuries after that date.⁴ The use of Al-Bīrūnī’s Śrī-Harṣa era of 457 B.C.⁵ is unknown to Indian epigraphic and literary records; but the fact that its epoch is just 400 years earlier than that of the Vikrama-saṃvat may suggest that this reckoning also was probably invented by astronomers for the purposes of calculations, although Al-Bīrūnī’s statement really appears to be based on a wrong information. The existence of a Maurya era starting from the fourth century B.C. was suggested by some scholars on the basis of a wrong reading and interpretation of a passage in the Hāthigumphā inscription⁶ of Khāravela.