Early Inscriptions of Āndhradeśa

This digital publication aims to present the complete primary textual data along with metadata, including precise information on the whereabouts of the inscribed artefacts, annotated English translations, for a major Indian epigraphic corpus that has so far only been studied with pre-digital methods. Our aim has been to identify in the field, or in museums, all inscriptions falling within our purview, to document them photographically, to re-edit them from the originals whenever possible, and to exploit the full potential of a digital corpus approach to these historical documents.

Initially focused on the inscriptions of Nagarjunakonda and the Ikṣvāku dynasty, on the one hand, and on post-Ikṣvāku documents for the history of Buddhism, on the other, the publication will eventually cover all records from the beginning of the epigraphic tradition in the part of India covered today by the states of Telangana and Andhra up to the rise of Telugu as epigraphical language of expression in the second half of the first millennium, as rough chronological cut-off point.

In this early period, the epigraphic corpus of Āndhradeśa is primarily connected with the history of Buddhism. Our work on this corpus began as part of a collaborative research project ‘From Vijayapuri to Sriksetra? The Beginnings of Buddhist Exchange across the Bay of Bengal as Witnessed by Inscriptions from Andhra Pradesh and Myanmar’, which investigated the history of Buddhism across the Bay of Bengal based on the epigraphic records of Vijayapuri (modern Nagarjunakonda) in India and Sriksetra (near modern Pyay) in Myanmar. See also Credits.

The data presented in this publication have been encoded in XML according to the EpiDoc schema compliant with the Text Encoding Initiative and processed through ODD in an eXist database.