Bairat

Discovery of Bairat

Harry Falk- Asokan Sites and Artefacts, 62-63

Discovery: Carlleyle on his tour in 1871-72; he mistook the two parts for “two important inscriptions in ancient characters of the time of Asoka on a rock there, which had never been discov ered before” (Carlleyle 1878: 91).

E. HULTZSCH - Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, XXIV-XXV

A much damaged version of the Rupnath-Sahasram edict was discovered in 1871-2 by Mr. Carlleyle about a mile to the north-east of Bairat, the head-quarters of a tahsil in the Jaipur State, Rajputana, about forty-two miles north-by-north-east of Jaipur City.

‘This edict is engraved on a block lying separately, but immediately below the hill locally known as Bhīm-ki-ḍuṅgrī….. It is inscribed on the eastern face and near the lower end of the rock.’

The inscribed block ‘is 17 feet in height by 24 feet in length from east to west, and 15 feet in thickness from north to south.’

The inscription was edited by Bühler and Senart along with the Rupnath and Sahasram ones (Nos. I and II, above). No facsimile of it has yet been published except Cunningham’s eye-copy in his Inscriptions of Asoka, plate 14, No. x.

Calcutta-Bairat Edict

Harry Falk- Asokan Sites and Artefacts, 106-108

Discovery: Edict stone Found by Burt 1840, published by Kittoe 1840. Immediately after its discovery it was proposed to shift the block to the seat of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (Burt 1840). This was then accomplished before 1856 (Wilson 1856: 358); the stone is now lodged in the museum room of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta.

Pillars: Sahni 1935-36: 86, 1937: 26. Sahni found lots of broken pieces of polished sand-stone. He assumed these pieces to come from two Aśokan pillars, one made of spotted Cunär sandstone and the other from unspotted. Today, there are no traces of these pillars, and the whereabouts of the pieces are unknown.

Capital: Allegedly, Sahni (1935-36: 86) found “One or two pieces broken from a figure of a lion”.

E. HULTZSCH, Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, XXV

The block which bears this very interesting and valuable record is now preserved in Calcutta by the Asiatic Society of Bengal. It was discovered in 1840 by Captain Burt ‘upon a hill lying adjacent to’ Bairat, the town near which some years later Carlleyle found the preceding inscription (No. III). Burt reported that he found the inscription ‘on a hard, grey granite block, irregularly shaped, and measuring about two feet in two of its dimensions, and a foot and a half in the third’ (JASB, 9. 616). His copy of the inscription was lithographed by Captain Kittoe, and transcribed and translated by the same ‘with the aid of the learned Pandit Kamala Kanta’ (id., p. 617 and plate).

Burt’s copy formed the basis of the editions of Burnouf (Lotus, p. 710ff.), Kern (Faartelling, p. 32 ff.), and Wilson (JRAS, 16. 35,7 ff., with lithograph). Senart edited the record in his Inscriptions de Piyadasi, 2. 197 ff., and published a revised edition of it, from an estampage by Burgess, in IA, 20. 165 ff. A photograph of Burgess’ estampage appeared in JA (8), 9. 498.

As Burt had stated that Bairāt was six kōs distant from ‘Bhabra’ (JASB, 9. 616), the inscription has been styled generally ‘the Bhabra edict.’ But this name implies a double mistake: the town from which it is derived is not called ‘Bhabra’, but Bhābrū, and the latter is twelve miles distant from Bairat, the finding-place of the block. According to Cunningham (Arch. Reports, 2. 247), ‘the hill on which the inscription was found forms a conspicuous object about one mile to the south-west of the town [of Bairat]. It is about 200 feet high, and is still known by the name of Bījak-Pahār̥ or “inscription hill”. It is covered with ruins which Cunningham (id., p. 248) took to be the remains of two Buddhist monasteries.

‘The inscription stone originally lay, I am told, near the shrine of Hanūmān below the rock known as top or “cannon”, on the first or lower platform on the summit of the hill.’ 4

In order to distinguish this inscription from the preceding one (No. III), I propose to call it ‘the Calcutta-Bairāț rock-inscription’.

Inscriptions at this site