The Greeks in Bactria and India c17.6

c17.6

In 1919 the late Dr Jayaswal and the late Professor R. D. Banerji made a fresh examination of the rock, and Jayaswal announced that he had read the word Yavanaraja, followed by the proper name Dimata; he has stated that he found the syllable -ma- clear and ultimately with great difficulty read Dimat[a.⁴ This reading, and its interpretation as the Greek king Demetrius, were accepted both by Banerji⁵ and by Dr Sten Konow.⁶ Konow however said of his own reading: ‘I can see Yavanaraja, as read by Mr Jayaswal, and of his Dimata the -ma- is quite legible’; he did not say if he could see the supposed faint traces of the rest of the word. Finally, in a joint article in 1930,⁷ Jayaswal and Banerji, after saying that -ma- was distinct and that the first and third syllables could be read with great difficulty, added that the Greek king Demetrius called himself Dime[tra on his coin legends. The inscription is in Prakrit, and Dimata might therefore, I suppose, replace Dimetra; but though Dimetra might have passed in 1919, when nothing was known of the Kharoshthi version of Demetrius’ name on his rare bilingual coins but the letters Dime-, it should not have been put forward in 1930, seeing that in 1923 Mr Whitehead had published¹ the bilingual tetradrachm (p. 77), now in the British Museum, which gives (in the genitive) the full Kharoshthi reading of Demetrius’ name, Demetriyasa. There is however among the transcriptions of the Greek name Demetrios² a seal from Besnagar which reads ‘Of Timitra’, and which would I suppose suffice to make Dimata a quite possible Prakrit form.³ But on the facts above stated it would appear that there is an element of conjecture in the reading.