The Naneghat Pass Above the Konkan Has a Satavahana Cave Inscription Listing Vedic Sacrifices and Fees That Include 11,000 Cows, 1,000 Horses and 24,400 Karshapanas

A cave beside the stairway of the Naneghat pass, in the Western Ghats west of Junnar in Pune district, holds a Prakrit inscription in Brahmi script that the Vienna scholar Georg Bühler counted in 1883 among the oldest historical documents of western India. The record names Vedic sacrifices one after another and the fee paid for each: cows by the thousand, horses, elephants, a village, and karshapanas, the coins named in the text. A row of labels on the back wall of the same cave names a royal family.

Prakrit was the everyday language of the period, as opposed to Sanskrit. Brahmi is the script in which Ashoka’s edicts were cut, and the cave is one of the places where early Satavahana rulers, the dynasty that held much of the Deccan around the start of the Christian era, left their names in stone.

A stairway cut through the Sahyadri rock

The Bombay Gazetteer volume on Poona (1885) describes the pass as it stood in the 1880s. At the top the road runs through a narrow gorge between two steep rocks, and the one on the north is called Nana’s Angtha, or thumb. The entrance is a staircase cut deep through the rock, dropping 50 to 100 feet (roughly 15 to 30 metres) from the plateau to a narrow terrace. Rock-cut caves line the stairs and still served as rest houses for travellers. The walls of the chief cave carry the inscription.

From the terrace a stair, partly built and partly hewn, runs down wooded slopes into the Konkan, the coastal strip below the Ghats. The Gazetteer puts the descent at about six miles (close to 10 km), from Ghatghar on the plateau to villages in Murbad, and calls it, after the Bor pass, the most used route between the Deccan and the Konkan within the Poona district’s limits. The heritage site Puratattva says the route is some 2,000 years old and still used by locals going down towards the Murbad and Kalyan area.

The Gazetteer repeats an account from 1675. The English physician Fryer, coming back from Junnar by this pass, found 800 oxen loaded with salt held up at the top and persuaded their drivers to let him through.

The pass’s name is usually traced to Marathi nane, “coin”. A contributor to the INDOLOGY list of Indologists gave that derivation in 2012 with a “probably”, and Puratattva gives it too, adding that a very large stone pot stands in place near the head of the pass. Local people call it a toll pot, and the Puratattva writer offers tax collection from traders as a possible use, not a proven one.

What the two walls say

Bühler’s edition of 1883 reads two long inscriptions, one on each side wall of the cave, each of about ten lines and each broken. He had Colonel Sykes’s copies, which he called imperfect, photolithographs made for James Burgess by Pandit Bhagvanlal, and a photograph of the first half. He wrote that the damaged state of the large text had probably put epigraphists off.

The text opens with homage to Dharma and Indra, to Samkarshana and Vasudeva, and to the four guardians of the quarters, Yama, Varuna, Kubera and Vasava. In Bühler’s gloss Samkarshana and Vasudeva are Balarama and Krishna, and he took the invocation as early evidence of the worship of Krishna and his family outside the Doab, the land between the Ganga and the Yamuna. The tradition behind that worship is told in Krishna, the many faces of a god. The text goes on to praise a queen, described in Bühler’s reading as chaste, as living like an ascetic even at home, and as well versed in vows and ceremonies.

The second part, after a marker word that Bühler renders “description”, lists the sacrifices and the fees. His translation gives, among others:

• an Agnyadheya, the kindling of the sacred fires, with a fee of 12 cows and a horse;
• fees of 1,700 cows and 10 elephants, and of 11,000 cows and 1,000 horses, for sacrifices whose names are lost;
• 24,400 karshapanas, plus 6,001 karshapanas as gifts to the spectators and menials;
• a Rajasuya, restored from a damaged line, and a second horse sacrifice with fees that include a horse with silver trappings and a village;
• a Bhagala-Dasaratra with 10,001 cows, a Gargatriratra with 301 dresses as gifts to the spectators and menials, a Gavamayana with 1,101 cows and an Angirasamayana with 1,101 cows.

Bühler marked several of these figures as uncertain, and the lists break off in damaged lines. He took them to show that what the Brahmanical school books say about the cost of the great sacrifices is not exaggerated. D. C. Sircar, who re-edited the text in 1965, wrote that the number of sacrifices shows the strong hold of Vedic ritual at the early Satavahana court. Bühler also noted that the family, while it gave freely to Buddhist monks, kept to the Vedic path. The Buddhist side of the same dynasty’s giving is documented at Karla, on the same road system.

The number 17 recurs in readings Bühler marked as doubtful: 17 milch cows, 17 presents to the spectators and 17 silver water pots. Puratattva credits the epigraphist Shobhana Gokhale with using multiples of seventeen in the fees to recover the damaged name of the Vajapeya sacrifice, and lists it among the rites. Bühler’s 1883 text does not name it.

Seven names above lost figures

On the back wall of the cave, short labels in the same script sit over the places where relief figures once stood. Bühler found the figures “entirely destroyed”. Puratattva says only round projections at the base, the feet, remain. His transcript of the labels names King Simuka Satavahana, “the illustrious one”; the queen Nayanika and King Siri Satakarni, together in one label; Prince Bhaya, with the end of the name lost; the Maharathi Tranakayira; Prince Hakusiri; and Prince Satavahana. Maharathi was a title of a great regional lord, which Bühler translated as feudal baron.

The queen’s name is a compound with a snake in it. Bühler’s note derives Nayanika from the Sanskrit naga, “snake”, as a double diminutive and gives Naganika as the Sanskrit form. Sircar’s note says her actual name must have been Nayanika or Naganika. Live History India names Simuka as the founder of the dynasty and Naganika as the daughter of a Maharathi, Tranakiya, who married Satakarni I.

The link between the labels and the long text is Bühler’s argument. The main inscription describes a queen who is the daughter of a Maharathi, the mother of Vedisiri and of a second prince named Sati, and the wife of a king whose name ends in “siri”. Her own name is lost. Bühler argued that the figures carved in the cave illustrate the large inscription and that the two sets of records belong together. Puratattva reports that V. V. Mirashi and Shobhana Gokhale attribute the long text to Queen Naganika.

Who raised it, and when

Three questions stay open, and the scholars named in the sources differ on each.

On who is speaking, Bühler read the epithets of a chaste, ascetic life as those of a widow. He concluded that she acted as guardian of her son Vedisiri, and that the sacrifices were offered, or caused to be offered, by her. Puratattva describes the text as listing sacrifices performed by the royal couple. According to a 2012 post by Andrew Ollett, who had Ajay Mitra Shastri’s Age of the Satavahanas at hand, Shastri suggested that Vedisiri set the inscription up during or after the reign of his father Satakarni I.

On the date, Bühler judged from letter forms that the cave was cut between 200 and 150 BCE. Sircar assigned the script to the second half of the 1st century BCE and placed it between the Besnagar pillar of Heliodorus, which he put at about the end of the 2nd century BCE, and the Hathigumpha inscription of Kharavela at the end of the 1st century BCE. Ollett reports that Mirashi accepted Bühler’s date and that Mirashi gave the reason that letter forms are not very reliable when the interval in time is short. Puratattva says only the 1st century BCE.

On the king, Live History India gives Satakarni I a reign of 70 to 60 BCE, while Ollett quotes Shastri dating him from 12 BCE to 44 CE. Richard Salomon wrote on the same list in 2012 that there had been very little study of the inscription since Bühler’s edition. Sircar’s edition heads the long text with the queen’s name followed by a question mark.

From Sykes’s copy to a reading

Puratattva says Sykes first published the inscription in 1837, in volume 4 of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. That is the year James Prinsep and George Turnour identified Ashoka as the author of the edicts, told in the story of Ashoka’s edicts, and Bühler’s translation followed 46 years later. His chapter in the Archaeological Survey of Western India was part of a report on caves edited by Burgess, and Bühler wrote in it that the Nanaghat texts were in some respects more important than all the other cave inscriptions taken together.

The road to the ports

The Gazetteer reads the rock-cut temples, rest chambers and inscriptions of the district as evidence that trade moved between the coast and the plateau by the Nana and Bor passes in the first centuries before and after Christ. Puratattva names Sopara, Choul and Kalyan as the ports the Naneghat road led to. Bühler’s transcript includes a later label, over one of the pass’s cisterns, recording a cistern given by Govindadasa of Sopara.

The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a Greek merchant’s guide from the first century CE, does not mention the pass. It lists Suppara and Calliena (Kalyan) as the market towns after Barygaza, adds that Calliena became a lawful market town under the elder Saraganus, and says that under Sandares the port was obstructed and Greek ships landing there might be taken to Barygaza under guard. It records that carnelian came to Barygaza from Paethana and cloth from Tagara.

Deccan College archaeologists began digging at Junnar in late 2005, according to a Times of India report of 14 December 2007 by Vishwas Kothari. It describes Junnar as a Satavahana seat of power, with imported wine, luxury goods and glassware among the finds, and Kalyan as the loading point from which traders went up to Junnar by Naneghat. Vasant Shinde of Deccan College was heading the project. The Roman side of this trade, on the other coast, is told in the Muziris article.

Bühler dated the Sopara cistern label to the time of Gautamiputra Satakarni I or Pulumayi, rulers he placed about 100 years after the long inscription.