Journey
The epigraphic record
India kept almost no archives and wrote almost no history, so most of what is known about its first two thousand years comes off rock, copper and temple walls. Inscriptions record grants, campaigns, guild rules, village elections and famine relief — and they are dated, which the literature generally is not.
Stops (25)
- Heliodorus pillar, Vidisha · Heliodorus pillar, Vidisha — a Greek Vaishnava, about 110 BCE
Erected by Heliodorus, ambassador of the Indo-Greek king Antialcidas to the Shunga court, and describing him as a Bhāgavata — a Greek from Taxila who had taken up the worship of Vāsudeva. It is the earliest datable evidence for Vaishnava devotion anywhere, and it comes from a foreigner.
- Udayagiri & Khandagiri caves · Hāthīgumphā, Udayagiri — Khāravela's own account
A long Prakrit inscription in the Jain caves near Bhubaneswar in which the Kalinga king Khāravela lists his campaigns, his canals and his public works year by year, and records recovering a Jina image that a Nanda king had carried off three centuries earlier. It is the earliest Indian repatriation on record.
- Girnār rock inscriptions (Junāgaḍh) · Girnār — three empires on one rock
Ashoka's fourteen edicts, Rudradāman's prashasti of about 150 CE and Skandagupta's inscription of 456, all on one Junagadh boulder and the later two both about repairing the same reservoir. Rudradāman's is the first substantial inscription anywhere in literary Sanskrit rather than Prakrit, which is the moment the language of record changes.
- Prayāga / Prayagraj/ Allahabad · The Allahabad prashasti — Samudragupta's conquests
Harisena's eulogy of Samudragupta, cut onto an Ashokan pillar, listing kings defeated in the north, kings reinstated in the south, and frontier rulers who submitted — the principal source for the Gupta empire's extent. It is written over the text of an emperor who had described renouncing conquest.
- Mandasor (Daśapura) · Mandasor — the guild of silk weavers, 473
An inscription recording that a guild of silk weavers who had migrated from Lāta to Daśapura built a sun temple, that some of them had since taken up other trades, and that they repaired the building decades later. It is the best account anywhere of how an early Indian craft guild actually worked.
- Uttaramerur · Uttaramerur — a village election, tenth century
Chola inscriptions on a Kanchipuram-district temple wall setting out how the village assembly chose its committees: qualifications for candidates, disqualifications for defaulters and their relatives, ballots drawn from pots by a boy, and fixed terms. It is the most detailed account of electoral procedure surviving from anywhere in the medieval world.
- Aihole · Aihole — Pulakeshin II and a date for Kālidāsa
Ravikirti's prashasti of 634 in a Jain temple records Pulakeshin II's defeat of Harsha and dates itself in both the Shaka era and years since the Bhārata war. Its author compares himself to Kālidāsa and Bhāravi, which is how a Chalukya inscription became a fixed point for Sanskrit literary chronology.
- Halmidi · Halmidi — Kannada, about 450
A short hero-stone inscription in a Hassan-district village, and the earliest dated record in Kannada. It commemorates a grant to a warrior, in a language that would wait another three centuries for a literature. The stone was moved to a museum in 1996 and a replica put in its place.
- Kalamalla · Kalamalla — Telugu, 575
A Renati Chola temple inscription in Kadapa district, the earliest dated record in Telugu. Like Halmidi it is modest — a grant, not a eulogy — and what it establishes is the moment a spoken language was judged fit to carry a permanent public document rather than the moment it acquired a literature.
- Shravanabelagola · Shravanabelagola — several hundred, in three languages
The two hills carry some eight hundred inscriptions from the seventh century to the nineteenth, in Kannada, Sanskrit, Tamil, Marathi and Marwari, including nishidhis recording sallekhanā deaths. It is the longest continuous epigraphic series at any single Indian site, and much of it records ordinary people rather than kings.
- Sittanavāsal · Sittanavāsal — Tamil-Brahmi in a Jain cave
A Pudukkottai rock shelter with Jain beds, Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions and the only substantial Jain murals surviving in the Tamil country. Tamil-Brahmi is the script in which Tamil is first written, adapted from Brahmi to handle sounds Prakrit does not have, which is itself an act of linguistic analysis.
- Kandahar (Old Kandahar edict) · Kandahar — Ashoka in Greek and Aramaic
A bilingual edict at the empire's western frontier, for Hellenistic settlers and an Achaemenid-era administrative class. The Greek does not translate dhamma literally but recasts it as eusebeia, piety, in the vocabulary of Greek moral philosophy — which means somebody at the Mauryan court could do that.
- Rabatak · Rabatak — the Kushan king list, found 1993
A Bactrian inscription in Greek script found in Afghanistan in 1993, in which Kanishka names his three predecessors in order and lists the cities he ruled. It settled the Kushan succession, which had been argued over for a century, and it is written in an Iranian language using a Greek alphabet in a Buddhist context.
- Sohgaura copper plate · Sohgaura and Mahāsthāngarh — the earliest of all
Two short Prakrit records in Brahmi, possibly pre-Mauryan, both about famine relief: a copper plate listing granaries and their contents at Sohgaura, and a stone at Mahāsthāngarh ordering grain and coin distributed to a people in distress. The earliest Indian writing we can read is administrative and about hunger.
- Sirkap & Sirsukh · Taxila — Aramaic in the north-west
An Ashokan inscription in Aramaic, the Achaemenid chancery language, at the Indo-Greek and Kushan city where three empires' scripts overlap. Taxila is best read as a stack of cities — the Bhir mound, then Sirkap on a grid, then Kushan Sirsukh — and the writing changes with each layer.
- Sagala / Sialkot · Sialkot — the Milinda Panha's city
Sagala, identified with Sialkot, is where the Milinda Panha sets the dialogue between the Indo-Greek king Menander and the monk Nāgasena — a Greek ruler questioned about Buddhist doctrine in a Pali text. Menander's coins carry a Buddhist wheel, so the literary claim has numismatic support.
- Changu Narayan · Changu Nārāyan — Nepal's first date, 464
The earliest dated inscription in Nepal, of the Lichchhavi king Mānadeva, in Sanskrit on a pillar at a Vishnu temple in the Kathmandu valley. It begins the valley's documented history and shows the Gupta-period Sanskrit epigraphic style reaching across the Himalayan foothills within a century of its development.
- Balkh · Balkh — the crossroads
A Bactrian city that was Zoroastrian, then a great Buddhist centre with the Nava Vihāra, then Islamic and the birthplace of Rumi, sitting where the roads from India, Iran and China meet. Xuanzang described its monasteries; almost nothing above ground survives, and what is known comes from inscriptions and travellers.
- Avantipora temples · Awantipora — Avantivarman's Kashmir
Two ninth-century temples built by the Utpala king Avantivarman, in a distinctive Kashmiri style with fluted columns and trefoil arches that borrows from Gandhāran and classical sources. The Rājatarangini, Kalhana's twelfth-century history, is the narrative these ruins belong to, and it is the one sustained work of history in Sanskrit.
- Parihaspora · Parihāsapura — Lalitāditya's capital
The eighth-century Karkota capital, built by Lalitāditya with a colossal Buddha and a temple whose stones were later carried off for other buildings. Kalhana describes it in detail; the site is now mounds and scattered plinths, which is what most early Kashmiri architecture has been reduced to.
- Farmana · Farmāna — Harappan burials in Haryana
A Harappan settlement and cemetery where isotope analysis of the teeth has shown that several of the people buried there grew up elsewhere and moved in — the first direct evidence of migration within the Indus world rather than inference from pottery styles.
- Sanghol · Sanghol — the stupa railing in the Punjab
A Kushan-period Buddhist site near Ludhiana where a buried hoard of some one hundred and seventeen carved railing pillars was found in 1985, in the Mathura idiom, apparently dismantled and deliberately interred. Nobody knows why, and the sculpture is among the best preserved of its school anywhere.
- Chunar · Chunar — where the stone came from
The sandstone quarry that supplied the Ashokan pillars and their capitals, including the Sarnath lions, and later Mughal and colonial building. The Mauryan mirror polish on stone from this quarry has never been satisfactorily explained, and the pillars were moved hundreds of kilometres from here by river.
- Quanzhou · Quanzhou — a Tamil temple in China
A thirteenth-century bilingual Tamil and Chinese inscription from the Chinese port records the building of a Śiva temple by a Tamil merchant, with the Yuan emperor's blessing. Some three hundred carved stones from it survive in the city. It is the furthest east any Indian temple inscription has been found.
- Rudradāman I · c. 150 CE
The Western Kshatrapa ruler whose Junagadh rock inscription is the earliest substantial inscription in Sanskrit rather than Prakrit, which makes one boulder the turning point in the epigraphic history of the language. It records rebuilding the Sudarshana reservoir after a cyclone from his own treasury, without levying a tax or forced labour, in prose ornate enough that the Sanskrit is part of the claim.