Four Lines You Can Actually Read

Seventeen lines are cut into the rock at Udayagiri, above a cave called Hathigumpha, the elephant cave, near Bhubaneswar.

Four of them can be read.

The rock is at Udayagiri, about three kilometres south of Bhubaneswar. Udayagiri and the neighbouring hill of Khandagiri are honeycombed with caves, partly natural, partly cut, generally understood to have been carved as residential cells for Jain monks during Kharavela's reign.

Eighteen survive at Udayagiri today and fifteen at Khandagiri. The scholar B. M. Barua, reading line fourteen of the inscription, concluded that Kharavela had excavated 117 of them.

The finest is the Rani Gumpha, the queen's cave, two storeys, its faces carved with royal processions, wild animals, musicians and Jain religious scenes. Whoever could command that quality of stonework was running a serious court.

The inscription itself is in cave 14 at Udayagiri: seventeen lines in deep-cut Brahmi.

The rest are damaged, partial, or argued over, read one way by one epigraphist and another way by the next. That is the entire archive for a king who, on his own account, marched on Magadha and broke a confederation of Tamil states.