The Purana Text of the Dynasties of the Kali Age c7.2

c7.2

Mistakes are found in the MSS, which can, it seems, be only explained satisfactorily by supposing that they arose out of misreadings of the ancient scripts (see Introdn. § 26). Some mistakes are obviously mere clerical blunders, but others cannot be accounted for naturally in that way. Kharoṣṭhī being the oldest Indian script that we know of, mistakes that could be traced to misreadings of its letters would be most significant. Such instances may singly be open to some distrust, but collectively they would have cumulative force; and without pronouncing a positive opinion, it does yet seem to me that certain misreadings do point to Kharoṣṭhī as their source. Such mistakes may prevail in many MSS, if they passed undetected from the beginning; otherwise they may only occur in single MSS, having been corrected in all the others.