The fixing of the exact time of the earliest Indian king whose inscriptions havesurvived to our days depends very much on the dates of two contemporaries whom he mentions: Magā or Makā, and Alikasudara or Alikyashudala. The former has been identified long ago with Magas of Cyrene, and the second was either Alexander of Epirus, or, as Professor Beloch thinks, Alexander of Corinth. The fresh dates to which these three rulers are assigned in Beloch's Griechische Geschichte induce me to reconsider the much-discussed question of the period of Aśōka's reign.

This article is an attempt to establish critically the synchronisms which appear to exist between the mediaeval portion of the Ceylon chronicle Mahāvaṁsa and the results of South Indian epigraphical research. The definite dates to which a number of Chōḷa and Pāṇḍya kings can now be assigned are due to the laborious and difficult calculations of my late friend Kielhorn, while several of the synchronisms were discovered by another old friend and fellow-worker, Rai Bahadur V. Venkayya, the melancholy news of whose sudden death at Madras on November 21, 1912, reached me while I was collecting materials for this article from his learned Reports.

At Mr. Sewell's request the Secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society sent me an impression of this inscription which had been made over to the Society some years ago by Colonel Gerini. At the same time M. Finot placed at my disposal a photograph of the back of the impression, which is reproduced on the accompanying Plate.

Since my publication of the Bharaut inscriptions the Indian Antiquary, vol. 21, p. 225 ff., Professor von Oldenburg has subjected the Bharaut sculptures to a careful examination in a Russian article which Professor Lanman has made generally accessible by an English translation in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 18, p. 183 ff. Professor von Oldenburg succeeded in tracing in the Pāli Jātaka book three of the Bharaut bas-reliefs which had not previously been identified. The references to four other jātakas could not be given in my first list, because at the time when it was drawn up vol. 6 of the Jātaka book had not yet been published. The same volume enabled me to restore conjecturally one of the Bharaut inscriptions, while repeated perusal of vol. 5 yielded explanations of two bas-reliefs which had remained unidentified.

The short and much damaged edict of Aśōka at Sāņchi is not without interest, because it supplements and explains the still more fragmentary Allahabad edict and the mutilated fourth line of the Sarnath edict. The beginning of the Sanchi edict is lost, and the legible words of the first and second of the preserved lines do not yield a complete sentence. The end of the second line and the beginning of the third have not yet been deciphered completely.

This fact that in the fourteenth century of our era the Pāṇḍya country with its capital Madura was ruled over by Musalmān princes, is known from the Travels of Ibn Batūta. The Madras Journal of Literature and Science for 1888–9 contained an article by Mrs. L. Fletcher on “Ibn Batūtah in Southern India”, to which Mr. L. White King and Captain R. H. C. Tufnell appended a “Note on the Coins of the Muhammadan Viceroys in Southern India” (p. 55 ff.).