Junagadh rock inscription of Rudradaman I

The inscription is carved on a large boulder east of Junagadh, at the foot of Mount Girnar; the oldest text on the rock is a version of Ashoka’s Major Rock Edicts, and in the 5th century the Gupta ruler Skandagupta added a third inscription. Rudradaman’s text relates that in the year 72 — reckoned in the Shaka era, about AD 150 — a storm and the swollen streams of Mount Urjayat (Girnar) breached the dam of the Sudarshana lake, built for Chandragupta Maurya by his governor Pushyagupta and furnished with conduits under Ashoka by the Yavana king Tushaspha (Yavana was the Indian name for the Greeks, though some scholars consider his name Iranian). When the king’s counsellors thought the breach, 420 cubits long, beyond repair, the minister Suvishakha, a Pahlava by origin and governor of Anarta and Surashtra, carried out the work: the dam was rebuilt three times as strong, at great cost to the king’s own treasury and without oppressing his subjects with taxes or forced labour.

The rest of the text is a eulogy of the king. It lists the lands he ruled, says that he destroyed the Yaudheyas and twice defeated Satakarni, lord of the Deccan, but spared him because they were closely related — which Satavahana king is meant is disputed; the kinship is usually explained by the marriage of Rudradaman’s daughter to Vasishthiputra Satakarni — and praises his learning in grammar, music and logic. Earlier Indian inscriptions, from Ashoka’s edicts to those of the Satavahanas, were mostly in Prakrit; the epigraphist Richard Salomon calls the Junagadh text a turning point in the history of epigraphic Sanskrit and the prototype of the poetic royal eulogies (prashasti) of the Gupta age.