A stone that speaks for three empires
At the foothills of Mount Girnar is a large, dark granite boulder, roughly 10 meters high with a circumference of seven meters. This single stone contains a historical record spanning almost 800 years, with inscriptions from three separate dynasties. The scientific study of these ancient scripts is known as paleography. The oldest and most extensive text belongs to the Mauryan Emperor Ashoka, dating to circa 250 BCE. His fourteen major rock edicts are carved into the northeastern face of the rock in the Brahmi script, using a Prakrit language. These edicts are not religious sermons but moral and administrative proclamations, outlining policies on non-violence, religious tolerance, and public welfare, including providing medical facilities for humans and animals.
Centuries later, around 150 CE, the Western Kshatrapa ruler Rudradaman I added his own inscription. This text is significant to Indian epigraphy as it is one of the earliest extensive inscriptions written in classical Sanskrit. It commemorates Rudradaman's repair of the nearby Sudarshana Lake, an artificial reservoir originally built during the reign of Ashoka's grandfather, Chandragupta Maurya. Rudradaman's text records that he funded the significant repairs from his own resources, without levying new taxes or using forced labor.
The final layer of history was added around 457 CE by the Gupta Emperor Skandagupta. His Sanskrit inscription records yet another repair to the Sudarshana Lake after its dam burst due to excessive rainfall. This unique layering of texts on a single boulder provides a record of public works, administrative continuity, and linguistic evolution in ancient India.
Cracking the Brahmi code
For centuries, the script of Ashoka's edicts was unreadable. The Brahmi script had fallen out of use by the 5th century CE, and knowledge of how to read it was lost. The inscriptions were a complete mystery. In 1837, James Prinsep, an English scholar and assay master at the Calcutta Mint, achieved a significant breakthrough. Prinsep, an expert in numismatics, had been studying bilingual coins issued by Indo-Greek kings. These coins featured the ruler's name in Greek on one side and in another script, Kharosthi, on the other. By comparing the known Greek names to the unknown script, he managed to decipher Kharosthi.
He applied similar comparative methods to the Brahmi script. An important clue came from short, repetitive inscriptions on the Sanchi Stupa, where Prinsep identified the recurring Brahmi characters for the word "danam," meaning "gift" or "donation." Using this foundation, along with insights from other scholars, he systematically decoded the entire Brahmi alphabet. When he applied this new knowledge to the edicts found at Girnar and other sites, the words of a long-forgotten emperor, "Devanampiya Piyadasi" (Beloved of the Gods, Piyadasi), came to light. Another historian, George Turnour, connected this name to the Mauryan emperor Ashoka mentioned in Ceylonese Pali chronicles. Through Prinsep's paleographic work, the legendary Emperor Ashoka was firmly established as a historical figure, and his empire's story began to be told from its own records.