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FIG. 29.-THE MAUNG-GON GOLD PLATE.

[From Epigraphia Indica, Vol. V., p. 101.]

ink, on birch bark cut to
imitate palm leaves.
These leaves are also
pierced with holes,
through which a string

a

can be passed to keep
the leaves together
plan always adopted for
palm leaves, but very
unsuitable for birch.

bark, which is so brittle
that the string is apt to
tear and break the
leaves, as it had done in
this case. The language
used in this MS. is suf-
ficiently near to classi-
cal Sanskrit for it to be
called Sanskrit. But
the five different short
treatises of which this
MS. consists contain, in
varying degree, a good
many colloquialisms.'
Other MSS. of great

1 See now, on this MS., Dr. Hoernle's magnificent edition of the texts, with lithographed reproductions, transliterations, and translations. Professor Bühler's preliminary remarks on it are in the fifth volume of the Vienna Oriental Journal.

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age have been recently discovered in Turkestan; but these are the oldest ones so far deciphered and edited. The others are still awaiting decipherment, and are in the hands of Dr. Hoernle for that purpose..

Now as the Bower MS. is in Sanskrit (though not good Sanskrit), and the Gosinga MS. is in a dialect allied to, but younger than Pāli, the natural conclusion would seem to be that, as Sanskrit is older than Pali, the texts contained in the Bower MS. must be older. That the MS. itself, the particular copy that has survived, is some centuries later, does not matter. Pali is to Sanskrit about as Italian is to Latin. Whatever the age of the MSS. in which the copies of them may be written, the text of a work by Vergil must be older than the text of a work by Dante. The conclusion seems, therefore, obvious that a work in Sanskrit, whatever the age of the MS. in which it is written, must be older than a work in Pāli, and, a fortiori, older than a work in a dialect that is, philologically speaking, younger than Pali.

Oddly enough the exact contrary is the case. Not only is the Gosinga MS. older than the Bower MS., but the verses contained in it are also older than the texts contained in the Bower MS., and that precisely because they are written in a dialect closely allied to Pali. And we should know this for certain even if we had only printed copies of these two works, that is, even if we had not the palæographic evidence of the age of the handwriting to guide us. For, in the period we are considering, the more closely a book or an inscription approximates to

129