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Halantas.
Original punctuation.
Other palaeographic observations. Anusvāra is a dot or small circle above headline, usually to the right of, but occasionally above the character to which it belongs and occasionally above the next character, especially when that next character is gha. In l7-8 saṁghaṭṭo° it may be pushed across a line and page break.
The project DHARMA has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no 809994).
Public URIs with the prefix bib to point to a Zotero Group Library named ERC-DHARMA whose data are open to the public.
Internal URIs using the part prefix to point to person elements in the DHARMA_IdListMembers_v01.xml file.
svast
k
ṇa-
ha-lā
lukyānāṁ kula-jala
-bhūri-k
māna-vik
ta-sakala-di
yaḥ samatiś
yog
kuṭa-ta
śrī-
Ayyavo
-v
rmmaṇa
ṇe ve
ś
ripramāṇa
g
-vijaya-rājya-saṁva
blind arm of a water course, elaborating that it is an extension of a tank or a natural body of water, which fills up only in the rainy season, and is a feature often seen at village boundaries in this part of the Andhra country. Although the interpretation assumes two non-standard spellings, writing
Greetings. From the ocean that is the lineage of the majestic Calukyas—who are of the Mānavya gotra which is praised by the entire world,
There has never been and will never be a gift surpassing the gift of land, nor has there ever been or will ever be a sin
He who would seize land, whether given by himself or by another
The boundary lists in lines 16-17 and 18-20 are somewhat problematic because of the inconsistent (and mostly missing) case endings. I am quite certain that the demarcation of two separate fields is presented here, both commencing with the location of the field with respect to the village Elūru. In each demarcation, this is followed by four pairs of “landmark” + “direction”, in the conventional order of East–South–West–North. It is therefore most likely that the landmarks are to be construed in the nominative, understood to mean that each landmark is to the specified direction of the field. With this interpretation, however, the syntax of the text is extremely fragmented, with several complete sentences inserted parenthetically as it were into the framing sentence that announces the grant.
Conversely, if the landmark–direction pairs are to be construed as compounds meaning that the field is to the specified direction of each landmark, the resulting sentence is syntactically more or less correct, although highly convoluted and complex. There are some cases in the Eastern Cālukya copperplate corpus where boundary demarcations are (or may be) presented in this manner. In the Jaḷayūru grant of Viṣṇuvardhana III, the demarcation likewise follows a statement of the field’s location with respect to the village. That grant, incidentally, is the only other Eastern Cālukya charter that I know of to use termite mounds as boundary markers. There, however, the directions come in the order West–North–South–East, whereby the conventional subjective order East–South–West–North obtains if the pairs are interpreted to mean that the field is to the said direction of the landmark. The Peddāpurappāḍu plates (set 1) of Viṣṇuvardhana II (but not the other two related sets from Peddāpurappāḍu) also situates the field relative to the landmarks, but there this is made explicit by putting the landmarks in the ablative case, although the actual order is still E–S–W–N, so the subjective order (of the boundaries relative to the field) is reversed. The Nutulapaṟu grant of Maṅgi Yuvarāja demarcates three fields in two differently unconventional sequences of directions, one or both of which may also have to be understood as positioning the field relative to each landmark. In the Peñceṟekuru grant of Maṅgi Yuvarāja, the landmarks are likewise in the ablative, and their sequence is likewise erratic. Finally, the Kopparam plates of Pulakeśin II also put the landmarks in the ablative case, but the sequence there is again unconventional (E–W–S–N).
It is thus possible that the demarcations are to be understood as situating the field relative to each landmark, but because the present charter employs the standard sequence of directions and does not use the ablative case for the landmarks, I think this is unlikely, and the demarcations are to be interpreted in the same way as those in the overwhelming majority of related grants, in spite of the syntactical difficulty involved.
Another possible complication in the boundary list ist that the word
Not noted by Krishna Rao, the recto of plate 3 is a palimpsest. No traces of earlier writing can be made out on any other page. On 3r, there were probably 4 lines of writing in larger characters than the present inscription, so that all of the fourth earlier line is below the last presently inscribed line, but there is still blank space below where there was probably no earlier writing. In this fourth line, the text
Reported in