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Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Other Indo-Aryan Languages. By RICHARD SALOMON. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. xxi, 378 pp. $65.00 (cloth).
Richard Salomon appropriately dedicates his book to the great Indian epigraphist and historian Dinesh Chandra Sircar. As a comprehensive overview of the field of Indian inscriptional studies and guide to the use of inscriptions, this work belongs on a very short shelf along with Sircar's Indian Epigraphy (1965) and Indian Epigraphical Glossary ( 1966).
There can be no question of the quantity, variety, and scholarly importance of inscriptions for the study of premodern South Asia. Over two decades back, Sircar gauged the number of Indian inscriptions at around 90,000, and many more have been recovered in the years since then. These inscriptions, as Salomon observes, come from every region of the subcontinent and from every century from at least the third century s.c.E. up to the present. Inscriptions have been crucial to the reconstruction of precolonial history, to the degree that Sircar could estimate that something like 80 percent of our historical knowledge of Indian history prior to the year 1000 C.E. derives from inscriptions. Epigraphical study is vital in South Asian studies, and Salomon's survey therefore fills an important need.
The scope of this survey is certainly impressive. Salomon sketches out a history of writing and scripts in India, offers a brief history of inscriptional languages, and provides a useful survey of inscriptions by type and chronology. He discusses methods of epigraphical study and the history of Indian epigraphical studies. He also comments on how inscriptions have been and may be employed in the reconstruction of Indian political, social, literary, religious, art, linguistic, and geographical history. He provides a detailed bibliographic survey that will be enormously helpful to all those...