Epigraphy: inscriptions and their decipherment

Detail

What epigraphy is

• Epigraphy = the study of inscriptions.
• Inscriptions = writings cut or engraved on hard surfaces — stone, metal (copper plates, coins), pottery.
• They record what the person who ordered them wanted remembered: a king's victories, a gift of land or money, an order to the people, or a religious idea.
• Because the surface is hard, they are virtually permanent. This is their big advantage over manuscripts, which rot and must be copied again and again.
• The Epigraphy Branch of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) studies writing on stone, metal, wood and shell, and uses it to rebuild political, dynastic, social, religious, administrative and economic history from the Mauryan period onwards. [3]
• ASI's estimate: more than one lakh (100,000+) inscriptions have been found across India so far. [3]

Dating an inscription

• Direct dating — the inscription itself gives a year (a regnal year of the king, or a year in an era).
• Palaeography — the study of old letter shapes. Letters changed slowly over centuries.
• The letter "a" of about 250 BCE looks different from the "a" of about 500 CE.
• So even an undated inscription can be placed roughly in time by comparing its letter shapes with dated ones.

Languages and scripts

• The earliest inscriptions are in Prakrit — the everyday spoken languages of ordinary people, not the language of priests.
• Later and other inscriptions use Pali, Tamil and Sanskrit.
• Asokan inscriptions:
• Most are in Prakrit written in the Brahmi script.
• In the north-west, Prakrit is written in the Kharosthi script.

• In Afghanistan, Aramaic and Greek were used.

• Brahmi matters far beyond Asoka: it is the parent of most later Indian scripts, including Devanagari, and of scripts used for Dravidian languages. [4]

• ASI's Epigraphy Branch works on both Dravidian and Sanskritic epigraphy. [3]

Two main genres

• Votive inscriptions — short records of gifts, from the 2nd century BCE onwards.
• They name the donor and often the donor's occupation.
• Occupations named include washerfolk, weavers, scribes, carpenters, potters, goldsmiths, officials, merchants and kings.
• Both men and women gave gifts to religious institutions.

• Why this is gold for historians: ordinary working people almost never appear in literary texts. Here they name themselves.

• Prashastis — long poems of praise for a king, composed by court poets.

• Written to be admired as poetry, not as a neutral record.
• Historians still mine them for facts, but must separate the fact from the flattery.

Prinsep and the decipherment (1830s)

• James Prinsep worked as an officer in the East India Company mint. He deciphered both Brahmi and Kharosthi.
• His mint career: assay master at the Benares (Varanasi) mint, 1820–30; back to the Calcutta mint as assay master in 1832; left for England in 1838 due to ill health. [2]
• An assay master tests the purity of metal in coins — this is exactly why he handled thousands of old coins and their legends.
• Prinsep was the first European scholar to decipher Asoka's edicts. [2]

How Brahmi was cracked:

• European scholars, helped by Indian pandits, worked backwards from letter shapes they already knew — Bengali and Devanagari — to the older Brahmi forms.
• Early attempts failed because scholars wrongly assumed the language was Sanskrit. It was Prakrit.
• Asokan Brahmi was read in 1838.

Note: Britannica dates the decipherment of Asoka's edicts to 1837, and notes Asoka was almost unknown before it except in Sri Lankan Buddhist chronicles and northern Buddhist works. [2] The NCERT date of 1838 is the one to use in the exam.

How Kharosthi was cracked:

• Indo-Greek coins of about the 2nd–1st centuries BCE carried the same royal name in both Greek and Kharosthi (for example Apollodotus).
• Greek letters were already known. So each Kharosthi letter could be matched to its Greek partner, one by one.
• Prinsep then identified the language of these Kharosthi records as Prakrit.
• The principle is the same one that cracked Egyptian hieroglyphs — a bilingual text where one side is already readable.

Proving that Piyadassi was Asoka

• Most early inscriptions do not say "Asoka". They say devanampiya ("beloved of the gods") and piyadassi ("pleasant to behold") — titles, not a personal name.
• A few inscriptions also carry the name Asoka, a king already famous from Buddhist texts.
• Scholars matched content, style, language and palaeography across the whole set and concluded that one ruler issued them all.
• Result: the man of the inscriptions and the Asoka of the texts are the same person. Epigraphy and literature were joined.

How epigraphists actually work

• Inscribed stone is often broken, worn or missing letters. So epigraphists add words in square brackets to make the sense clear, without changing what the writer meant.
• They also test claims rather than believe them.
• Example: Asoka boasts that earlier rulers had "no arrangements for receiving reports".
• Is it true, plausible, or exaggerated?
• Asoka says his own pativedakas (reporters) brought him news at all times and in all places.
• A king praising his own new system has an obvious reason to run down the past. So the statement is evidence of Asoka's claim, not automatically of past fact.

Landmarks in Indian epigraphy

• 1810s — Colin Mackenzie collects over 8,000 Sanskrit and Dravidian inscriptions.
• 1838 — Prinsep reads Asokan Brahmi.
• 1877 — Alexander Cunningham publishes the set of Asokan inscriptions.
• 1886 — Epigraphia Carnatica begins; in the same year the Epigraphy Branch was set up at Bangalore. It moved to Ootacamund in 1903, stayed till 1966, then shifted to Mysore, where it still works. [3]
• 1888 — Epigraphia Indica begins.
• 1965–66 — D.C. Sircar publishes Indian Epigraphy and Indian Epigraphical Glossary.

What decipherment changed

• By the early 20th century, the broad outline of dynastic political history — which king, which dynasty, roughly when — was settled.
• Historians then moved to the harder question: context.
• How did political change connect to economic and social change?
• These links are rarely simple, so the new work is about explaining change, not just listing kings.

Prelims Hooks

• Epigraphy = study of inscriptions; palaeography = study of old letter shapes/writing styles.
• Earliest Indian inscriptions are in Prakrit, not Sanskrit.
• Asokan inscriptions: Brahmi (most of India), Kharosthi (north-west), Aramaic and Greek (Afghanistan).
• James Prinsep, an officer of the East India Company mint, deciphered Brahmi and Kharosthi; Asokan Brahmi read in 1838 (Britannica: 1837 [2]).
• Prinsep was assay master at the Benares mint (1820–30) and the Calcutta mint (from 1832). [2]
• Kharosthi was cracked using bilingual Indo-Greek coins (c. 2nd–1st centuries BCE), e.g. king Apollodotus.
• devanampiya = "beloved of the gods"; piyadassi = "pleasant to behold"; both used by Asoka.
• Votive inscriptions (from 2nd century BCE) name donors and their occupations; prashastis are praise-poems for kings.
• Colin Mackenzie collected 8,000+ Sanskrit and Dravidian inscriptions in the 1810s; D.C. Sircar wrote Indian Epigraphy (1965–66).
• ASI Epigraphy Branch: founded 1886 at Bangalore → Ootacamund 1903–1966 → Mysore; over one lakh inscriptions found in India. [3]
• Series: Epigraphia Carnatica (1886), Epigraphia Indica (1888), Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum (ASI). [3]

Mains Points

• Inscriptions are permanent but partial. They survive where manuscripts rot, and they are contemporary with the events. But only the powerful and the well-off could pay to have stone cut. Many were lost, damaged or never found; letters are often unreadable. So the record is biased towards kings, donors and religious institutions — it is not a full picture of society.
• Decipherment was a colonial project with Indian help. Prinsep worked in a Company mint; Mackenzie's survey and Cunningham's ASI were state projects. Brahmi was read by working backwards from Bengali and Devanagari with Indian pandits assisting. This shows knowledge production as a joint effort, even inside a colonial structure — useful for any question on colonial knowledge and Indian history-writing.
• Epigraphy forced a shift from "who ruled" to "how society worked". Once the dynasty lists were fixed by the early 20th century, historians used votive inscriptions — weavers, potters, goldsmiths, women donors — to write social and economic history from below. The same source type answers two very different questions.
• Epigraphic evidence must be cross-checked, not copied. Prashastis praise; Asoka's claim about earlier kings having no reporting system is self-serving. Good history compares the inscription with texts, coins and archaeology, and asks who paid for the stone and why.