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FIG. 153. Facsimiles of Inscriptions.

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(69.) Gamani Abayasa puta Tisayasa lene Sihapane1 agata anagata catu disa sagasa. Devanapiya Maha raja Gamiņi Abayasa puta Tisayasa leņe Naga heți agata anagata catu disa sagasa. Under this are two symbols, (1) the Swastika, or magic cross, raised on a pole standing on a horizontal base line from which rise four short upright lines, two on each side, as in No. 62, the tops of the two middle ones being joined by a straight line; and (2) a flag on a standard which rests on an upright cross enclosed in a rectangle. This may be a fence round it. Dr. Müller erred in placing this inscription at Giribāwa; it is cut over the wihāra at Gallena.

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The cave Sihapane' of Tissa the Noble, son of Gāmaṇi Abhaya; to the Community of the four quarters, present or future. The cave Underthe-Rock' of Tissa the Noble, son of the great king Gāmiņi Abhaya, beloved of the Gods; to the Community of the four quarters, present or future.

The stone-cutter was an ignorant man who began to cut the word anagata in place of Naga, and then cancelled the initial a. He may have made some mistake in the second word, which I take to be a name of the cave, and possibly intended for Siha pahane,' the Lion Stone.' Compare Nilapanatata, lit. 'the Blue Stone plain,' in an inscription at Ridi wihāra, given with others at that place in the account of the Ancient Weapons. Nila pana is equivalent to the modern kalu gala, gneiss.

(70.)

Devanapiya Maha rajasa Gamiņi Abhayasa puta Tisayasa lene Sita guhe agata anagata catu disa sagasa. At the end are the same two symbols as in No. 69.

The cave

Cool Cave' of Tissa the Noble, son of

1 Dr. Müller informed me that the initial is S and not P as I copied it in 1878.

Gāmiņi Abhaya, of the great king beloved of the Gods; to the Community of the four quarters, present or future.

(71.) Devanapiya Maha raja Gamaņi Abayasa puta Tisayasa lene Cuda Sudasana agata anagata catu disa sagasa.

(72.)

The caveSmall Beautiful' of Tissa the Noble,
son of the great King Gāmaņi Abhaya, beloved
of the Gods; to the Community of the four
quarters, present or future.

Devanapiya Maha raja Gamiņi Abayasa puta
Tisayasa lene agata anagata catu disa sagasa.
The cave of Tissa the Noble, son of the great king
Gāmiņi Abhaya, beloved of the Gods; to the
Community of the four quarters, present or future.
This is cut over the wihāra.

With regard to the names of these caves, various titles of such dwellings are sometimes met with elsewhere, as in Nos. 47, 48 and 81. An inscription in letters of the earliest type at Periyakaḍuwa wihāra, in the North-western Province, runs :— (73.) Symbol, an upright plain cross with wide arms each consisting of two lines joined at the ends by transverse ones. Parumaka Nakatika Tisa puta Parumaka Sumanasa dane. Five dots in a vertical line, making a full-stop. Maha Sudasane nama lene sagasa.

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son (of) the Chief

The gift of the Chief Sumana,
Nakatika Tissa. The cave Great Beautiful'
by name; to the Community. The name of the
donor's father may perhaps be Nāga Tikkha
Tissa, or he may have belonged to a village of the
district now called Naekatta.

Another in characters of the first century B.C., at Rankirimaḍa wihāra, in the same Province, is :

(74.)

Gamika Wasabayi Parumaka Wasabaya tiba nami lene.

The villager (headman) Wasabhaya's cave, which has the name 'the Chief Wasabhaya.'

G G

The shapes of the letters in all the Gal-lena inscriptions are distinctly those of the first century B.C. At that period there was only one king, Waṭṭa-Gāmiņi, who was called Gāmiņi Abhaya, and his adopted son Mahācūla Mahā-Tissa must have caused the inscriptions to be cut while the king was still reigning, and probably, as he is entitled 'Dēvānam-piya,' in the latter part of his reign, that is, about 80 B.C. The omission to mark the long a or aspirated b in some of them is not unusual elsewhere; it is, in fact, the general rule in Ceylon.

(75.) After Gāmiņi-Tissa succeeded to the throne he made over the great Dambulla cave to the monks, and left there the following inscription :

Symbol, a Swāstika elevated on a pole with two short vertical bars on each side of it rising from the base line on which it stands. Devanapiya Mahā rajasa Gāmiņi Tisasa maha leņe agata anagata catu disa sagasa dine.

The great cave of the great king Gāmiņi-Tissa, beloved of the Gods; given to the Community of the four quarters, present or future.

(76.) After this we have one at Mihintale cut by his wife. Maha rajaha Gamini Tisaha bariya upasika Ramadaraya 1(e)n(e) sagasa.

The cave (of) the female devotee Ramadharayā,

wife of the great king, of Gāmiņi-Tissa; to the Community.

We learn from the Mahavansa that Mahācula had two wives. One was the notorious Anuļā, the mother of KuḍāTissa, whom his brother married after his death; the other, who became a nun, was the mother of Kālakanni-Tissa. Evidently it was she who caused this inscription to be cut.

Prince Gāmiņi-Tissa must have been more than a youth when his uncle Waṭṭa-Gāmiņi adopted him on his accession, as his son; or the succession would not have been secured to him in preference to the king's own son. It may be conjectured that it was a politic act of the king to pacify the party who supported Tissa's claim to the sovereignty. invaders afterwards held northern Ceylon for

As the Tamil fifteen years,

he may have been between thirty and forty years old when Waṭṭa-Gāmiņi regained the throne in 88 B.C. He might possibly cut the Rūgama inscription immediately after his adopted father began to reign, that is, in 104 B.C., before the latter had built the Abhayagiri dagaba and wihāra and thereby acquired the title Dēvānam-piya. At the latest, it must have been cut soon after 88 B.C. The inscriptions at Gallena may have been cut shortly before Waṭṭa-Gamini's death, after he had acquired the title.

Next come the inscriptions cut by the sons of Gāmiņi-Tissa. (77.) Mr. Bell found an inscription at Andiya-kanda, another part of Rițigala, which runs :— Devanapiya Maha raja Gamani Tisaha puta Devana

piya Tisa A- leņe agata anagata chadu disa sagasa lene.

Mr. Bell fills the blank in the second name by making the word Abaha, but the inscriptions which follow indicate the expression Ayaha, and the translation would then be :

The cave of Tissa the Noble, beloved of the Gods, son of Gāmaṇi-Tissa, the great king beloved of the Gods. A cave of the Community of the four quarters, present or future.

This inscription may belong to Prince Kuḍā-Tissa, and the absence of the royal title in his case shows that he had not succeeded to the throne, that is, it must have been cut before 50 B.C., and most probably during his father's lifetime.

Next comes the inscription at Nuwara-gala in the Eastern Province, which was republished in 1907 by Mr. F. Lewis, in the Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. It was discovered and first published by Mr. Nevill in the Taprobanian, vol. i, p. 150. The forms of the letters j and m prove that it belongs to the first century B.C. (78.)

Devanapiya maha rājaha Gamiņi Tisaha puta
Maha Tisa Ayaha leņe sagike.

The cave belonging to the Community, of Mahā-
Tissa the Noble, son of the great king beloved
of the Gods, Gāmiņi Tissa.

The son who left this inscription may be the one who became

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