Essays on Indian Antiquities Volume 1; Historic, Numismatic, and Palaeographic (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1858 Excerpt: ...and further, as linked, by identity of symbols, with a still more extended chain of the early and less developed mintages of proximate lands. They associate on their surfaces two dissimilar alphabets, and, as the ordinary sites of their discovery are confined within something like definite limits, they assist, under the latter aspect, in narrowing the debatable point of contact of the two forms of writing. That we are not yet able to fill up the various gaps in this wide circle of connections, --that we cannot discover the names they disclose, amid the defective materials of the written history of the country; or, at the moment, fix an epoch or extemporize an empire for their issuer, --may perhaps savour more of cautious reserve than of deficiency of open data, or poverty of imagination in their application. With all these drawbacks, however, the coins themselves well fulfil their secondary mission, and contribute direct information by a record of titles, designations, family relationships, and a parallel combination of phonetic signs representing antagonistic systems. Categorically, they exhibit the style and titles of 'Raja' and 'Maharaja, ' the names of Kunanda and Amogha--who are shown to be brothers--and their opposing surfaces display nearly counterpart legends, expressive of these details, the one couched in the Arian or Bactro-Pali letters of Semitic derivation; and the other symbolized in the local alphabet of India Proper of a type but little removed from the earliest Lat, or monumental character, that furnished the exemplar upon which have been based the various styles of writing of so many Eastern nations. In regard to the places wherein these coins are chiefly found, I should, without hesitation, indicate the country in and around Behat as the mos...