गुप्त अभिलेख संग्रह (जे. एफ. फ्लीट - गुप्त सम्राटों एवं परवर्ती नरेशों के ऐतिहासिक पाषाण व ताम्रलेख)

60 CORPUS INSCRIPTIONUM INDICARUM, VOL. III.
on Nos. 4 and 5, Sir E. Clive Bayley interpreted as the figure 9, and entered as such in his
Table, occupies exactly the position which is filled in Prinsep's coin No. 1, referred to on
page 58 above, note 1, by a symbol resembling a crescent moon on the top of a short
staff with a cross-handle ; and this suggests that the sign in question is not a figure at
all. I give here a reproduction of Sir E. Clive Bayley's representation (id.
Plate vi. No. 6) of the signs in question, which were supposed by him, and [Glyph]
by Mr. Thomas, to represent the word Gupta, and were claimed by him (id. p. Gu-pta.
127) to be "a fair rendering of the usual form of the word." What they really
mean, I will not attempt to decide ; beyond pointing out that, as I have said above, they
must be numerals of some kind or another. But it will be admitted at once, by any quali-
fied palæographist, that they answer in no way whatever to the usual form of the word Gupta,
and cannot be so interpreted in accordance with any known alphabet ; even though we
should follow Mr. Thomas (id. p. 128) in looking upon them as "a degraded and contracted
form of the word," or Sir E. Clive Bayley (id. p. 145) in holding them to be "a gross corrup-
tion of it." And to these remarks I will only add that, as I have shewn at page 19 ff. above, the
very expression Guptasya kâla or Gupta-kâla is a purely imaginary one, without any real
epigraphical existence ; and, therefore, abbreviations of it cannot possibly exist on
the Kâbul coins, or on any others. As a Postscript to his paper, Sir E. Clive Bayley
shortly afterwards issued some remarks on the Twelve-Year Cycle of Jupiter, as used
in the grants of the Mahârâjas Hastin and Saṁkshôbha. His views on this point, how-
ever, were radically vitiated, in the first place, by his following General Cunningham’s
mistaken assumption that the saṁvatsaras of this cycle always begin and end with the luni-
solar years ; and, further, by a series of mistakes which it is really difficult to know how to
criticise properly. He took the saṁvatsara that is mentioned in the Bhumarâ pillar
inscription, No. 24, page 110, to be Mahâ-Mârgaśira, instead of Mahâ-Mâgha ; a mistake
which threw this record out by two saṁvatsaras. He proved General Cunningham's results
to be right only in one instance out of the five, viz. in the case of this supposed Mahâ-Mârga-
śira saṁvatsara of the Bhumarâ record, by himself making them gratuitously wrong, in assum-
ing that General Cunningham's epoch for the era was A.D. 167-68, instead of A.D. 166-67.
And he entirely overlooked the fact that, as there are ordinarily twelve years in each cycle,
and as his own proposed epoch was exactly twenty-four years later than that proposed
by General Cunningham, his own results could be neither any more nor any less correct
than General Cunningham's under ordinary circumstances ; but would, in the particular
case, be less correct than General Cunningham’s, because, by General Cunningham's
Table, which he accepted as correct, there was an expunction of a saṁvatsara between
A.D. 394 and 395, which, while it did not affect General Cunningham's results, did affect
his own, in making Gupta-Saṁvat 209 coincide with the Mahâ-Kârttika saṁvatsara, instead
of Mahâ-Âśvayuja (for which, by the way, Sir E. Clive Bayley again wrote Mahâ-Mârgaśira)
as recorded in the grant itself, No. 25, page 112. In fact, a full examination of the original