The Dynasties of the Kanarese Districts of the Bombay Presidency from the Earliest Historical Times to the Musalman Conquest c8.s10.154

c8.s10.154

in the Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, was finished in 1888. My work was fortunately rendered complete and successful by two things. In consequence of information given by Mr. Arthur Sulivan, Mandasôr was visited,— first in March, 1884; and there my copyists then discovered the all-important inscription which supplied what had always been felt to be a most urgent desideratum, viz. a date, for any one of the Early Gupta kings, recorded in a standard era, capable of identification, other than the era that was habitually used by the Early Guptas themselves. It furnished the date of the Mâlava year, i.e. the Vikrama year, 493 expired, corresponding to A. D. 436-37 current, for Kumâragupta I.; and thus, with also a revised translation, given to me by Professor Wright, of a well-known passage in Albêrûnî's writings, I was enabled to prove, for the first time, what had often been asserted but had never been proved before,— viz. that the Early Gupta kings rose to power in the fourth century A. D., and that the dates of their records run, not from A. D. 77-78, 166-67, or 190-91, but from A. D. 319-20 or very closely thereabouts. And, at the end of 1886, Mr. Shankar Balkrishna Dikshit came to the front,— shewed how, with the use of certain Hindû Tables, Hindû dates may be converted into their exact English equivalents,¹ — and made the necessary calculations, some of them extremely laborious, for the Early Gupta dates, as the result of which, the given unqualified years being applied as current years, the exact epoch, or year 0, of the Gupta era is shewn to be A. D. 319-20, and the first current year, A. D. 320-21.²