Photo: Ash Kadakkod · CC0A Tamil stone record of the great merchant guild ‘the Five Hundred of the Thousand Directions’ at the camphor port of Barus.
In Shaka 1010 the guild, meeting at Varocu (Barus), set down an agreement about dues to be paid by ships’ masters and crews. The opening praise and the guild’s name are the same as in its records in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.
It shows Tamil merchants organised and settled in Sumatra in the Chola age, half a century after Rajendra Chola’s raid on Srivijaya.
InscriptionA treaty between the Hittite king Suppiluliuma I and Shattiwaza, prince of Mitanni in north Syria, sworn before the gods of both kingdoms. Among the Mitanni gods stand four names any Vedic priest would know.
InscriptionThe Persian king Darius I tells, in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian, how he took the throne and which lands obeyed him. Gandhara is on the list.
InscriptionAshoka’s message of dhamma, carved in Greek and Aramaic for the Greek and Persian-speaking subjects at the western edge of his empire.
InscriptionFourteen major rock edicts, minor rock edicts and seven pillar edicts in which the Maurya emperor speaks in his own voice, as Devanampiya Piyadasi.
InscriptionIn conquered Kalinga, Ashoka left out the thirteenth rock edict, which mourns the war, and carved two separate edicts addressed to his officers there instead.
InscriptionA small bronze-copper plate in early Brahmi, issued by the officials of Shravasti, cast with symbols of storehouses above the text.
InscriptionSeventeen lines in Prakrit and Brahmi recording, year by year, the reign of Kharavela, the Jain emperor of Kalinga.
InscriptionA stone Garuda-dhvaja raised to Vasudeva by Heliodorus, a Greek envoy from Takshashila, at the court of King Bhagabhadra.
