Free India Discovered by John Keay Page A

‘neatliest engraven’. According to Alexander Cunningham ‘it resembles nothing so much as a stuffed poodle on top of an inverted flower pot’.
    We now know of at least nine inscribed Ashoka columns, but these are considerably outnumbered by the Ashokainscriptions carved on convenient rocks. The pillars naturally claimed attention first, but in fact the rock inscriptions proved more interesting both in content and location. The pillars were found only in the north of India (Sanchi was the most southerly), widely scattered round the Ganges basin. The rock inscriptions were found much further afield, from Mysore in the south to near Peshawar in theextreme north-west; and from near the coast of Orissa in the east to the coast of Saurashtra in the west. These last two, the first at Dhauli in Orissa, the second at Girnar in Gujerat, were the only ones known to Prinsep. Luckily they were two of the most informative.
    The Orissa inscription had been discovered in early 1837. Lieutenant Markham Kittoe had been sent into the wilderness of Orissato search for coalfields. Left much to his own devices he also searched for antiquities and soon stumbled on a whole network of ancient caves and sculptures. He described his find to the Asiatic Society:
I have further great pleasure in announcing the discovery of the most voluminous inscription in the column character that I have ever heard of&. There is neither road nor path to this extraordinary piece of antiquity. After climbing the rock through thorns and thickets, I came of a sudden on a small terrace open on three sides with a perpendicular scarp on the fourth or west from the face of which projects the front half of an elephant of elegant workmanship, four feet high; the whole is cut out of the solid rock. On the northern face beneath the terrace, the rock is chiselled smooth for a space of near fourteen feet by ten feet and the inscription, neatly cut, covers the whole space.
    He spent a day taking a facsimile and returned to the spot again in November of the same year to complete the job. In places the rock was badly worn but he found that the shadow thrown by the evening sun enabled him to pick out letters that were not otherwise apparent. In spite of severalgaps, Prinsep immediately attempted a translation and made out a number of intriguing phrases. But he gave up the task in early 1838 when a copy of the much better preserved Girnar inscription came to hand.
    This had first been noticed by Colonel James Tod, another legendary figure in this story, who had been on a tour of Gujerat in 1822.
The memorial in question, evidently of some great conqueror, is a huge hemispherical mass of dark granite, which, like a wart upon the body, has protruded through the crust of mother earth, without fissure or inequality, and which, by the aid of the ‘iron pen’, has been converted into a book. The measurement of the arc is nearly ninety feet; its surface is divided into compartments or parallelograms, within which are inscriptions in the usual character.
    In Tod’s time the script was still, of course, a mystery. The Colonel was one of those who thought it might be Greek. But he was nearer the mark when he confidently predicted that, sooner rather than later, someone at the Asiatic Society would solve the problem. Meantime he had taken copies of only two short sections.
    Fifteen years later, a Bombay antiquarian, hearing of Prinsep’s translationof the pillar inscriptions, quickly headed for Girnar. He wanted to see if the new code would work on Tod’s inscription. ‘To my great joy, and that of the Brahmins with me, I found myself able to make out several words.’ The engraving was still amazingly sharp; it was possible to make an impression, filling the letters with ink and pressing a cloth over them. From this he made a reduced copy – onthe original each letter was nearly two feet high – and sent it off to Calcutta.
    Prinsep, turning from the Orissa inscription to this new