Art. XI— On the Date and Personality of Priyadarsi

Extract

The present paper will fall into two divisions; the first of which deals with the name and date of Priyadarsi as they appear in the Edicts, whilst the second, will take notice of the doctrines introduced ab extra; by which is meant the hypotheses connected with the names Asoka and Chandragupta. The reasons for this separation are cogent. In the first place the degrees of confidence with which the author expresses himself are different. In the one series of questions he is, to a great extent (though not altogether) in the position of the biblical historian, who, although he be ignorant of Greek and Hebrew, has, nevertheless, a sufficient store of facts in the standard translation of the Old and New Testaments to put him, for nine points out often, on an approximate level with the professed scholar. The Edicts themselves are not only accessible to the general reader through the translations of Prinsep and Wilson, but the data that bear immediately and decidedly upon them are accessible also. So far as they lie in the coinage of the Bactrian Kings they are to be found in the pages of the Ariana Antiqua and the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal.