Mayidavolu plates of Sivaskandavarman

The Mayidavolu plates are the oldest Pallava charter on copper. They show a Pallava prince at Kanchipura giving orders about a village in the Telugu country.¹ He gave them through an officer at Dhannakada, the old Satavahana centre near Amaravati.¹ See Sivaskandavarman and the Pallavas.

Discovery and description

A man digging in a field found the plates about the middle of 1899.² The field was on the site of an abandoned village north of Mayidavolu, a village twelve miles east of Narasaraopet in what was then the Krishna (then Kistna) district.² The site, about four acres, held the ruins of a small old temple.²

J. Ramayya, who had already brought the Chikkulla plates to notice, sent the plates to V. Venkayya.² E. Hultzsch edited them from Venkayya’s ink impressions.² The owner later gave them to the Madras Museum.¹

There are eight plates, written on fifteen sides, held on a ring whose ends are fixed in an oval seal.² The seal shows in relief a couchant (lying) animal with a hump, “apparently a bull”.²¹ Below it is a legend that Hultzsch read as Sivaskandavarmmanah.²¹ Plates ii to viii are numbered with the old number signs.¹³ The date is written both in words and in numerals.¹³

Script and language

The alphabet is like that of the Hirahadagalli plates of the same king.³ But it has letters of unusual form that Hultzsch called “an epigraphic curiosity”.³ The language is a Prakrit which differs from literary Pali in several ways.¹ The spelling mostly follows the cave inscriptions, in which one consonant stands for a double one.¹³ The family name is written Palava.¹³

Content

In Hultzsch’s translation the order begins: “From Kanchipura the Yuva-Maharaja Sivaskandavarman (of the family) of the Pallavas, who belongs to the gotra of the Bharadvajas, orders (his) official (vyaprita) at Dhannakada”. For his own victory and the increase of his merit, life and power, the prince had given the village of Viripara in Andhrapatha to two Brahmans.⁴ They were Puvakotuja and Gonandija of the Agnivesya gotra (clan), and received it with all the immunities of a Brahman’s grant.⁴

The village was to be free from digging for salt and from the entry of soldiers.⁴ It was also free from supplying bullocks, boiled rice, water-pots, cots and lodgings.⁴ Anyone who troubled the donees would suffer bodily punishment.⁴ The order is dated on the fifth day of the sixth fortnight of summer in the tenth year.⁴⁵ The prince was himself the executor.⁴⁵

The places

Hultzsch could not identify Viripara.¹ The order went to the officer at Dhannakada, which he took to be Amaravati, so he placed the village near Amaravati.¹ See Amaravati and Dharanikota.

D. C. Sircar noted that different scholars had identified Dhannakada with Dharanikota, Amaravati, Vijayawada (then Bezwada) and Nagarjunakonda.⁶ Andhrapatha, Hultzsch explained, means the Telugu country.¹

Date

The tenth year is apparently that of Sivaskandavarman’s father, whose name the plates do not give.¹ Hultzsch placed the grant much earlier than the 8th century because of its archaic alphabet and its Prakrit, but gave no closer date.¹ G. Jouveau-Dubreuil compared its letters with the Kondamudi plates of Jayavarman, and dated it about 200, or soon after 236.⁷

Sewell’s chronology dated it about 234.⁸ Sircar placed it in the first quarter of the 4th century.⁹ He compared its wording with the Manchikallu inscription of the Pallava Simhavarman.¹⁰¹¹

Footnotes

1. Hultzsch, “Mayidavolu Plates of Sivaskandavarman” (1901), p. 85 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵

2. E. Hultzsch, “Mayidavolu Plates of Sivaskandavarman”, Epigraphia Indica VI (1900–01), p. 84 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

3. Hultzsch, “Mayidavolu Plates of Sivaskandavarman” (1901), p. 86 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

4. Hultzsch, “Mayidavolu Plates of Sivaskandavarman” (1901), p. 88, translation (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

5. Hultzsch, “Mayidavolu Plates of Sivaskandavarman” (1901), p. 89, translation (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩²

6. Sircar, Successors of the Satavahanas (1939), p. 185 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩

7. G. Jouveau-Dubreuil, The Pallavas (1917), pp. 2–3 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩

8. Robert Sewell and S. Krishnaswami Aiyangar, The Historical Inscriptions of Southern India (1932), p. 16 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩

9. D. C. Sircar, The Successors of the Satavahanas in Lower Deccan (1939), p. 166 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩

10. D. C. Sircar, “Two Inscriptions from Guntur District”, Epigraphia Indica XXXII (1957–58), p. 87 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩

11. Sircar, “Two Inscriptions from Guntur District” (EI XXXII), p. 89 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩