Early History of the Dekkan down to the Mahomedan Conquest c23.7

c23.7

Before applying these tests to the initial date given by Albîrûnî, it must be premised that according to the Arabic author the Gupta era was 241 years posterior to the Śaka To convert a Śaka date into a Valabhî date, or which is the same thing, into a Gupta date, he tells us to deduct from it the cube of 6 and the square of 5, that is, 241 And proceeding to give actual instances, he says 953 Śaka corresponds to 712 Valabhî or Gupta We have thus to add 241 to a Gupta date to arrive at the corresponding Śaka date Again, as I shall show in Appendix B, in inscriptions the numerical date indicates, in a large number of instances, the number of years of an era that have elapsed, that is, the *past* year and in about a third of the instances, the *current* year The year of the cycle, however, whenever it occurs, is as a rule the current year, though in rare cases that also is the past year If, therefore, a past Gupta year is to be converted into [128] the current Śaka year, we shall have to add 242 to the former, while if both are current or both past, the difference between them is only 241