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Art. XVI.—Notes on some Brāhmī-Kharoṣṭhī Inscriptions on Indian Coins
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2011
Extract
These notes are the result of a personal examination of Brāhmī-Kharoṣṭhī inscriptions on coins published by Sir A. Cunningham in his Coins of Ancient India (London, 1891 = C. CAI. in the following pages), and now in the British Museum. I have selected here only those coins on which we find a Brāhmī inscription word by word confirmed by a Kharoṣṭhī inscription. The best known of these biliteral coins are those of the Kuṇindas, to which I have devoted another monograph which I hope to publish shortly. In this monograph I enter more fully into the discussion of certain questions of phonetics, which equally affect the inscriptions dealt with in the present article. By examining and comparing the readings thus given in both alphabets, we may hope to obtain some definite results as to the decipherment of the various forms of each. In the first place, an account is given of these forms as they occur in each inscription, so that they may be compared with those already known from other sources, and their readings determined in accordance with results already obtained. As a rule, these inscriptions exactly correspond, syllable for syllable, to each other. Such differences as do occur—e.g., in case-forms, in vowels, in varied representations of the same sound—are of great interest from the point of view of phonetics.
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References
page 410 note 1 The scheme of transliteration adopted here is that given in J.R.A.S., 1895, p. 880. The italics indicate such of my readings as differ from those of Cunningham or Rapson. A short stroke = ditto. A dot placed at the side of, or instead of, a character indicates an erasure partial or complete.
page 410 note 2 My esteemed friend Professor R. O. Franke, in his lectures on Indian Palaeography given at Berlin in 1895, first made me aware of the fact that Cunningham's reading of letter No. 7 required correction.
page 413 note 1 For varieties of jña see table ii, 42, c. xix, jnā (Pabhosā); iii, 40, c. ix, jñaḥ; iv, 41, c. viii, jñā; and 43, c. xvi, jña.
page 414 note 1 It may be added that this inscription begins with the latest date hitherto known in Kharoṣṭhī inscriptions, viz. 
, i.e. in the Samvat year 384.
page 416 note 1 Mr. E. J. Rapson, whose attention I drew to this reading, had already, am glad to say, come to the same conclusion.
page 418 note 1 On a Mathurā coin mentioned above (see pl. iv, 6), C. CAI, pi. viii, 14, we find a Sanskrit instrumental side by side with a Prakrit genitive in a Brāhmī inscription: rā-jñā rā-ma-da-ta-sa.
page 419 note 1 For this influence on the part of the labials in Pāli phonology, see E. Müller, Pāli Grammar, p. 6.
page 420 note 1 For the Prakrit representatives of ājñā, cf. Kuhn, Beiträge, p. 36.
page 421 note 1 Cf. añña- ‘other’ from anya-, or pajjuṇṇa-. ‘cloud’ from parjanya-.
page 421 note 2 In regard to the representation of the palatal ña in Prakrit-Sanskrit coininscriptions, I may refer incidentally to the Yodheya coins figured in pi. vi, 2–4, of C. CAI.(cf. Rapson, , Ind. Coins, pl. iii, 13)Google Scholar, on some distinct specimens of which in the B.M. I read “yo-dhe-yā-nā bra-h(ma)-dha-ña-ke” (the yo and yā being identical with those of Bühler's t. iii, 31, cols, xiv and xiii); and also to those of pi. vi, 9–13 (cf. Rapson, pi. iii, 15), the name on which runs “brahma (once mha)-ṇya-de-va-sya,” the ṇya being also written ña.
page 421 note 3 Somewhat similar is the addition of new terminations to old case-forms seen in such instances as aṃ-ti-yo-gassā, a-ti-yo-genā (Khālsi, Aśoka Edicts, ii, 1. 5, and xiii, 1. 4). For such forms as rañña-ssa and rā-ja-ṇā, see Müller, Grammar, p. 77.