A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c6.24

c6.24

Inscriptions are the most copious and authentic source of Indian history, particularly of South Indian history. The earliest are in the Brāhmī script and constitute the southern versions of the Aśokan edicts found in Siddāpura, Jaṭinga-Rāmeśvara, and Brahmagiri in Mysore state, Maski in Raichur district, and Yerraguḍi and Rajula-Mandagiri in Kurnool district. They show the extent of the Mauryan empire in the South, but their contents belong to the general history of India and have little particular bearing on conditions in the South. Not so the short inscriptions found in natural caves in the Tamil districts which seem to record the names of the carvers of the rock-cut beds they contain or of their occupants; though their script is Aśokan Brāhmi with modifications, the language employed in them seems to be the most ancient form of Tamil so far known to epigraphy. These records number only twenty or thirty in all, though many more of a similar nature are found in the island of Ceylon. These brief records which still continue to be enigmatic in some measure are evidence of the spread of ascetic orders, probably Jain but also Buddhist, in the early centuries before the beginning of the Christian era. To the same epoch belong the inscribed relic casket from Bhaṭṭiprolu in the Krishna valley, an early witness to the stronghold of Buddhism in that region, and the early inscriptions of the Sātavāhana dynasty found engraved on the walls and pillars of the exquisite cave temples at Kanheri, Karle, Nasik and other places in the western Deccan. The language of these records is generally a local variety of Prākrit which is the generic name for all popular tongues with Sanskritic affiliations; the script is Brāhmi with variations due to locality and time; all are engraved on stone.