History of India, c. 150 A.D. to 350 A.D.: Naga–Vakataka Imperial Period c14.s4.t1.23

c14.s4.t1.23

¹ Mr. Pargiter (E.I. XI. 85) has misread a passage on the date of Virasena's coins in Dr. Vincent Smith's Catalogue of Coins. Mr. Pargiter thought that Dr. Smith accepted the date about 300 A.D. for Virasena. But he missed Vincent Smith's distinction which he made between the Virasena of the coins of Cunningham and Rapson and the so-called Virasena of a later series. [The later ‘Virasena’ is really Pravarasena (§ 30)]. The result of this unfortunate mistake in regarding the two series of coins as one by Mr. Pargiter has been a sad one. Although he notes that the forms ‘Y’ and ‘V’ are found in inscriptions varying in date from the first century B.C. to the second century A.D., and that of ‘sh’ not until the second century A.D.’, yet to bring the age of the inscription in agreement ‘with Mr. V. Smith's conjecture regarding Virasena's age’ [which Dr. Vincent Smith never made about the Virasena we are concerned with] Mr. Pargiter would place the inscription in the third century A.D., and ‘very possibly’ in ‘the latter part of it’. Mr. Pargiter never realised that Dr. Smith postulated two Virasenas. Mr. Pargiter put forward two reasons for assigning a late date, both of which are absolutely untenable. One is that the bar denoting the long ‘ā’-value shows a slight curve upwards, which he regards to be a Gupta tendency and not Kushan. His second reason is that the heads of the letters in this inscription are slightly wedge-shaped. Mr. Pargiter is entirely wrong both on principle and on fact. His principle for determining a later age of an inscription is to find out as to when ‘later or new forms found in this inscription came into use’. I am not the first to question this principle. Dr. Fleet himself has questioned it by a footnote (E.I. XI 86: ‘any particular record may easily give the first available instances of types found in it, and so may carry them back to earlier times than had been previously established for them’). The two grounds of Mr. Pargiter, assuming them to be correct on fact, cannot make a record whose letters admittedly range from the first century B.C. to second century A.D. and not later, a record of the end of the third century A.D. But the facts of Mr. Pargiter are also wrong. The slight