The Maski Rock Edict, Found on 27 January 1915 by a Gold-Mining Engineer, Was the First Ashoka Inscription to Give the Emperor's Own Name Beside His Title Devanampiya, and It Stands Near Ancient Gold Workings in Raichur

On 27 January 1915 a gold-mining engineer named C. Beadon found an inscription of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka on a granite boulder near Maski, a village in the Raichur district of what was then the Nizam of Hyderabad’s territory. E. Hultzsch, who edited all of Ashoka’s inscriptions for the Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum in 1925, gives that date. The first line begins with the words Hultzsch reads as Devanampiyasa Asokasa, “of Devanampiya Asoka,” and it was the first inscription of the emperor’s to join his royal title to his own name.

A boulder at the mouth of a cavern

Hultzsch describes the find in his introduction, quoting the account of H. Krishna Sastri, who was then the Government of India’s acting epigraphist (the official who reads and records inscriptions). A huge rock resting on smaller ones forms the cavern. At its southern entrance stands a block of crystalline grey granite, with the writing facing inward. Krishna Sastri gives its size as roughly 8 feet 9 inches by 5 feet. The surface, he says, has peeled away in places, sometimes down to the depth of the cut letters.

Hultzsch places Maski in the Lingsugur taluka (sub-district) of Raichur district, about 46 miles west-south-west of Raichur. On the Raichur district website’s short page about the edict the distance is 88 km from Raichur, and the discovery is credited to C. Beadon in 1915. The exact position needed a correction at the time, though. J. F. Fleet, reviewing Krishna Sastri’s paper in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1916, noted that the bearing and distance first printed would land in the Bellary district of Madras. Krishna Sastri’s latitude and longitude, 15 degrees 57 minutes north and 76 degrees 45 minutes east, matched the village the old Indian Atlas called Mooski.

The Nizam’s government had set up an archaeological department in 1914, Fleet writes, and the Maski paper was the first number of its Hyderabad Archaeological Series, issued in 1915. Its title, as Hultzsch cites it, was The New Asokan Edict of Maski. Writing in 1916, Fleet called the record the first known one to mention the king by the name Asoka and not only by his titles. A German journal carried Hultzsch’s own edition of the text in 1916, and Vincent Smith added it to the third edition of his book on Ashoka, published at Oxford in 1920, as the latest addition to the collection of edicts and the only one that gives the king’s name.

What the eight lines say

Maski is one of several copies of what scholars call Minor Rock Edict 1. The others, in Hultzsch’s list, are Rupnath, Sahasram and Bairat, plus three in the Mysore State: Brahmagiri, Siddapura and Jatinga-Ramesvara. Damage to the Maski copy leaves gaps and bracketed restorations through the eight lines of Hultzsch’s transcription. It is cut in a Prakrit (a spoken form of ancient Indian speech) in Brahmi letters.

Hultzsch’s translation has the text open as a proclamation of Devanampriya Asoka. The king says that two and a half years and somewhat more have passed since he became a Buddhist. Hultzsch reads the Maski word as Buddha-Sakya, where the Sahasram, Bairat and Siddapura copies say upasaka, a lay worshipper. He adds that a year and somewhat more has passed since he visited the Samgha, the Buddhist community, and showed zeal. Next the text says that gods once unmingled with people in Jambudvipa, the ancient name for the Indian subcontinent, have now become mingled with them.

The practical point comes next. In Hultzsch’s rendering: “This object can be reached even by a lowly (person) who is devoted to morality.” The king then tells his readers not to think that only the exalted can reach it, and says both the lowly and the exalted must be told so. If they act this way, the text promises, the matter will be prosperous and long lasting.

Interesting and disappointing: that was Fleet’s verdict on the find. What survives lacks the passage with the number of nights, found in other copies, that had been argued over for years. In Smith’s list, Maski stands with Bairat and Siddapura as copies where the words and numerals of the closing sentence are missing.

The name that went with the title

The edicts of Ashoka had been read since James Prinsep’s work in the 1830s, and until Maski every one known to Smith named its author only by titles. According to Smith, the titles Devanampiya, the Beloved of the Gods, and Piyadasi appear in the records alone or together. Why the question stayed open is set out in Hultzsch’s introduction. Prinsep first gave the edicts to a king of Ceylon, then moved toward Ashoka after finding a cave inscription of a Dasaratha, a grandson of Ashoka, who used the same title, and a chronicle that gave Piyadassi as a surname of Ashoka. Rock Edict 8 shows that Ashoka’s predecessors also bore the title, and the Sanskrit play Mudrarakshasa applies a form of the same name to Chandragupta, the dynasty’s founder, so a different Mauryan king could in principle have been meant. Our piece on Ashoka tells how Prinsep got there, and the Barabar caves article covers the Dasaratha inscriptions.

Hultzsch’s verdict on Maski is that every such doubt was now set at rest, because the king calls himself Devanampriya Asoka. Hultzsch adds that the name Asoka had been known only from Buddhist literature and the Puranas, the old Sanskrit compendia of lore. Smith writes that in an inscription it next turns up in one of Rudradaman, which he dates to about 152 CE: the Sanskrit record on the Junagadh rock. Ashoka’s Greek and Aramaic edicts at Kandahar were found in 1958 and 1963, decades after Maski.

Why a gold engineer was the one who found it

The village sits in gold country. As Hultzsch and Fleet report him, Krishna Sastri thought the country around Maski bore clear traces of an important ancient gold-working district. Smith adds that the edict was cut on a rock close to ancient gold mines.

The gold also touches a place name. The Brahmagiri copy of the same edict, in Hultzsch’s translation, opens “From Suvarnagiri, at the word of the prince (aryaputra) and of the Mahamatras,” and then orders the officers at Isila to be wished good health and told what follows. Mahamatras were senior state officers. Suvarnagiri means Golden Hill. Smith calls it the seat of a viceroy of the south and says its position is not known, but that the Maski edict’s nearness to the gold mines suggests it lay in Raichur district. Hultzsch proposed a nearby candidate, Kanakagiri, a synonym of the name, south of Maski and north of the Vijayanagara ruins.

Not everyone agreed. In 1916 Fleet argued that Suvarnagiri is the hill Sonagiri near Rajgir in Bihar, in the heart of Ashoka’s dominions, and noted that the name is hard to find anywhere in southern India. So the location of Suvarnagiri is still a matter of argument and the Maski stone does not settle it.

Archaeologists working at the site now add a mining detail. Peter Johansen and Andrew Bauer, reporting on the first seasons of the Maski Archaeological Research Project, record the edict as site MARP-1, near the western base of the Durgada Gudda hill. It sits on one of a few routes uphill to a gold ore-processing area, MARP-8, less than 120 metres away. They suggest that Mauryan involvement in the area may have included “staking claims to the region’s significant gold ore deposits,” and they note that the empire’s centre lay more than 1,400 km to the north. The survey also lists an in-filled gold mine shaft, first noted by Munn in 1934.

A town the edict did not begin

Maski had a long history on either side of Ashoka. As Hultzsch quotes Krishna Sastri, a Chalukya inscription dated Saka year 949 calls the place “the royal residence of great Mosangi,” and a Yadava inscription of the 13th century uses the same phrase. Mosangi, Hultzsch adds, suggests a link with the battlefield where, in Tamil records, the Chalukya king Jayasimha II lost to Rajendra Chola I. Our article on the Cholas covers that dynasty.

In 1954 the Archaeological Survey of India dug at Maski under B. K. Thapar, and the report appeared in Ancient India number 13 in 1957. Johansen and Bauer’s 2015 paper summarises the four phases that came out of it: Neolithic, 3000 to 1200 BCE; Iron Age, 1200 to 300 BCE; Early Historic, 300 BCE to 500 CE; medieval, 500 to 1600 CE. The Ashokan stone itself belongs to the Early Historic phase. In their 2013 survey report the authors count one Early Historic settlement, Maski itself, at about 15 hectares, five times the largest Iron Age settlement. Their first radiocarbon dates, published in Radiocarbon in 2015, show heavy occupation of the Durgada Gudda hill in the 14th century CE. Four charcoal samples from graves south of the hill also show that burial practices built around large stones, usually assigned to the Iron Age, are older than that period.

A new excavation was announced for the summer of 2025. Shiv Nadar University’s page, dated 13 February 2025, names Hemanth Kadambi, Johansen and Bauer as its leaders and says earlier work found a settlement history reaching back “a couple of millennia” before Ashoka. Outlook Traveller reported on 25 July 2025 that fieldwork had run about three months under permission from the Archaeological Survey of India. On 30 August 2025 the Deccan Chronicle said that the findings had not been officially announced. As of 29 October 2026 no excavation report had turned up in the sources checked for this article.

What the sources disagree on

The day of the find is given as 27 January in Hultzsch’s introduction, the earliest scholarly account used here. Authorship of the 1915 volume is given differently in the literature: Fleet and Hultzsch name Krishna Sastri, while Smith’s bibliography credits G. Yazdani, the head of the Nizam’s archaeology office, with the edition and plates. Maski’s Neolithic start date is 3000 BCE in the 2015 paper and about 2700 BCE in the 2013 report by the same two authors.