Place · early Kannada inscription · India
Halmidi
The earliest known Kannada-language inscription, carved on a stone slab around 450 CE at Halmidi in Hassan district, Karnataka — a 16-line Kadamba-period record of King Kakutsthavarma granting village rights to a Naga chieftain Vijaruju for a victory in battle. The Halmidi inscription marks the point at which Kannada enters the epigraphic record as a written language, moving from vernacular oral usage into state administrative documentation. Before Halmidi, Karnataka inscriptions used Prakrit and Sanskrit. The slab was discovered by M.H. Krishna in 1936 and is now in Government Museum, Bangalore. Halmidi village has a modern replica installed on the original site.
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 13.180, 75.900
Connections (2)
- Script continuity withAihole
The Halmidi inscription of about 450 CE is the earliest known writing in Kannada, the point at which a regional language enters the epigraphic record on its own account rather than as a few words inside a Sanskrit text. Sanskrit eulogy continues alongside it at Aihole and everywhere else for centuries; what changes is that the vernacular is now also a language fit to be cut in stone.
- Companion in the same setKalamalla
Kalamalla for Telugu in 575 and Halmidi for Kannada in about 450 are the earliest dated inscriptions in the Deccan's two great languages, and both are modest records of grants rather than royal eulogies. What they establish is the moment a spoken language was judged fit to carry a permanent public document — three or four centuries, in both cases, before it carries a literature.
On these journeys
Sources
Halmidi inscription studies
Open Halmidi in the repository →