- Support
- Beam, doorstep or fragmentary maṇḍapa pillar. ARIE designates support as ‘broken pillar’, but Sarkar 1968-71: 227 mentions: “The undressed part of a maṇḍapa-pillar of the monastery at Site 23 contains an indistinct inscription, presumably the name of another mason”, which possibly designates the present item; h. 30 × w. 125 × d. 43 cm.
- Text
- Middle Indo-Aryan, Southern Brāhmī script. Four graffiti. Inscribed area: h. 17 × w. 28 cm. Engraved by at least two different hands and with different orientations, here marked blocks 1 and 2. The second block is written perpendicular to the lines of block 1.
- Date
- Undated. Attributable to about the 3rd century CE on palaeographic grounds.
- Origin
- Presumably installed originally at findspot.
- Provenance
- Discovered at Nagarjunakonda, site 23, before 1960. Identified at Nagarjunakonda Museum, in the fortification enclosure, in February 2016.
- Visual Documentation
-
Photo(s):
- AL 2017
- Editors
- Arlo Griffiths and Vincent Tournier, with contributions by Stefan Baums and Ingo Strauch.
- Publication history
- The three graffiti of block 1 noticed in ARIE 1959-60 . The fourth graffito, or block 2, perpendicular to the others, was added in ARIE 1976-77: B.2 . Re-edited here from available documentation and after autopsy of the stone.
Block 1
(1)
bu
[na]
(2)
hathikasa
(3)
budharakhitasa
Block 2
nagutara
Block 1
(1) bu [na]
(2) hathikasa
(3) budharakhitasa
Block 2
nagutara
Block 1
<ab xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0">
<lb n="1"/>
<w xml:id="tok4529">bu</w>
<w xml:id="tok4530">
<unclear>na</unclear>
</w>
<lb n="2"/>
<w xml:id="tok4531">hathikasa</w>
<lb n="3"/>
<w xml:id="tok4532">budharakhitasa</w>
</ab>Block 2
<ab xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0">
<w xml:id="tok4533">nagutara</w>
</ab>Veneration to the Buddha (?). Of the hathika (?)
Budharakhita (Buddharakṣita).
Nagutara (Nāgottara).
- bookmark Raghunath 2001: 189 (no. 73)