# On the Brink of the Third Century of Indic Epigraphic Publication

Dániel Balogh

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## To cite this version:

Dániel Balogh. On the Brink of the Third Century of Indic Epigraphic Publication. Journal of the Asiatic Society, 2024. hal-05055981

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# On the Brink of the Third Century of Indic Epigraphic Publication

Dániel Balogh

## Abstract

Scholarly editions of inscribed texts have changed greatly since James Prinsep's days, and we stand at the threshold of another major qualitative change. An epigraphic edition is expected to convey both the inscription as received, and the editor's interpretation of it. Technological advances have greatly facilitated the production, dissemination and accessibility of editions. However, in order to exploit the potential of the massive material now available, publications must be accompanied by computer-readable annotation (metadata) in a standardised framework. Within the actual editions of texts, the established system of annotation consisting of symbols and footnotes must likewise be replaced by computer-based descriptive markup. Such markup is concerned with the conceptual classification of parts of the text rather than with how they should appear on the page or screen. Separating the particulars of presentation from this conceptual classification permits flexible manipulation, searching and visualisation for the editions of the future.

**Keywords:** digital humanities, digital epigraphy, Sanskrit epigraphy, text editing, copperplate inscriptions.

To cite this article

Balogh, Dániel 2024. On the Brink of the Third Century of Indic Epigraphic Publication. *Journal of the Asiatic Society 66/2: 79–108.*

ISSN:0368-3308
When James Prinsep was my age... he had been dead for ten years. Quite incidentally to his initial aspirations as an architect, his training in chemistry and his day job as an assayer at the mint, he had designed bridges, drained swamps, reconstructed buildings, founded and edited the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and contributed vitally to the decipherment of Aśokan Brāhmī (e.g. Kejariwal 1988: 162–164). Yet the purpose of this essay is not to dwell on his achievements, but to offer a glimpse of how epigraphic methodology has progressed since his day. I shall take as an example the inscription published by Prinsep (1836a: 726-731) under the name *Seoní grant*. When D. M. McLeod, the assistant of the Commissioner of the ‘Nerbudda’ territories, sent an eye copy of this grant to Prinsep, he recognised its script as akin to that of a copperplate set from Chattisgarh, which had already been deciphered with the aid of a Jain scholar named Śrī Varma Sūri and published in *Asiatic Researches* (Jenkins and Wilson 1825).<fnref n="1" />

Prinsep sent a copy of the alphabet of this latter inscription to McLeod, who aspired to decipher the plates himself, but eventually relinquished that ambition and instead dispatched an eye copy of the entire grant to the Asiatic Society. Thereupon, Prinsep determined (1836a: 727), that in spite of the script's superficial similarity to the Chattisgarh plates (written, as we now know, around the turn of the seventh century), the glyphs of McLeod's plates were essentially more akin to those of the second inscription on the Allahabad (now Prayagraj) pillar,<fnref n="2" /> engraved in or very shortly after the time of Samudragupta (which we can now allocate to the second half of the fourth century CE). He correctly deciphered the name of the plates' issuer as Rudrasena, along with those of several of his predecessors, and that of his dynasty. This is how the appellation Vākāṭaka first surfaced in modernity. It baffled Prinsep, who assumed that these

<footnote n="1">¹ Now known as the Rājim plates of Tīvaradeva, Year 7: Fleet (1888: 291-299, No. 81). DHARMA digital edition by Natasja Bosma: https://dharmalekha.info/texts/INSDaksinaKosala00026.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² The Allahabad inscription of Samudragupta: Fleet (1888: 1–17, No. 1). Siddham digital edition by Dániel Balogh: https://siddham.network/ inscription/in00001.</footnote>
princes 'were of inferior grade' (Prinsep 1836a: 727), even though he gave due importance to the plates' claim of a matrimonial alliance with the Gupta dynasty, the notion of whose existence (as distinct from the Maurya dynasty) was just then beginning to take shape in Prinsep's circles (Prinsep 1836b: ix-x).

This first humble report of the Vākāṭaka dynasty’s legacy on the Journal’s pages includes McLeod’s drawing of the first page along with Prinsep’s interpretive copy of the rest of the plates (part of which is shown here in Figure 1). This is accompanied by a full transliteration of the text into modern Devanāgarī (illustrated in Figure 2) and an English translation. Due to the (at the time) unfamiliar nature of the original script, the transliteration contains a fair number of mistakes, especially in the more obscure passages where a general knowledge of the Sanskrit language was insufficient for educated guesses.<fnref n="3" />

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Figure 1. Eye copy published by Prinsep (1836a, Pl. 33)</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>Figure 2. The text as transliterated by Prinsep (1836a, 729; shown as a re-creation, not a facsimile)</figcaption></figure>

<footnote n="3">³ It may be noted here that Prinsep's own Sanskrit was quite rudimentary, so while he is probably to be credited with a first transcription of the original text to Devanāgarī, it must have been his pandit Kamalakānt who then improved on that transcription on the basis of language expertise.</footnote>
Subsequently, the plates were re-examined in John Faithfull Fleet's monumental *Inscriptions of the early Gupta kings and their successors* (Fleet 1888: 243–249, No. 56) and assigned the name by which we know them today: the Siwani plates of Pravarasena II. Fleet obtained the original and produced inked estampages from it (illustrated in Figure 6 below), published together with his edition of the text in Romanised transliteration (Figure 3), a commentary and an English translation.

Third Plate; Second Side

23 purvvêṇa | sva-simâ-par[i*]chchh[ê*]dêna Karañjavi(?chi)raka-ṭaṭê |(||) Atr=âsmat-santakâḥ

24 sarvvâdhyaksha-n[i*]yôga-n[i*]yuktâḥ âjñâsañchâri-kulaputr-âdhi-kṛitâḥ bhaṭâḥ-

25 ṣ²=chhâtrâś=cha viśuta-pūrvvayâ âjñayâ âjñâpayitavyâḥ [|*] Vidita-

26 m=astu ta(va)ḥ yath=aishô=smâbhiḥ âtmanô dharmm-âyur-bbala-vijay-aiśvaryya-vi³vṛi[d*]dhayê

27 ih-[â*]mutra-hit-ârttham=âtv(tm)-ânugrahâya |⁴ vaijayikê dharmma-sthânê⁵ | a-bhaṭa-

2 Read bhaṭâś.

3 First vṛi was engraved here, and then, it was corrected into vi, by adding the i and partially erasing the ṛi.

4 This mark of punctuation is unnecessary.

5 After this word, we require atisṛishṭaḥ, or some similar word [...].

Figure 3. The text as edited by Fleet (1888, 246; shown as a re-creation, not a facsimile)

Vasudev Vishnu Mirashi's opus *Inscriptions of the Vākāṭakas* (in the same *Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum* series as Fleet's above-mentioned work) also includes a re-edition of this inscription (Mirashi 1963: 28-32, No. 7). Mirashi rechecked the text against Fleet's inked estampages, and rendered it in modern Devanāgarī (Figure 4), accompanied by a new translation and commentary.

As a further incarnation of the scholarly publication of the same text, I introduce a twenty-first century digital edition. This was first created for the project Asia Beyond Boundaries (2014–2020), funded
Third Plate: Second side

23 पूर्वेण । स्वसीमापर(रि)च्छ(च्छे)देन करञ्जविरकतटे । अत्रास्मत्सन्तकाः

24 सर्वाध्यक्षन(नि)योगनियुक्ताः आज्ञासञ्जारिकुलपुत्राधिकृता भटाः⁸

25 इछात्राश्च विश्रुतपूर्वया आज्ञया आज्ञापयितव्याः[1*] विदित-

26 मस्तु तः(वः) यथैषोस्माभिः आत्मनो धर्मायुर्ब्बलविजयैश्वर्यवि९वृध(द्व)ये

27 इह(हा)मुत्रहितार्थमात्वा(मा)नुग्रहाय । वैज्यिके धर्मस्थाने¹⁰ अभट-

8 Read भटा-.

9 वि, which was engraved at first, was later changed to वि.

10 Supply अतिसृष्टः.

Figure 4. The text as edited by Mirashi (1963, 30; shown as a re-creation, not a facsimile)

by the European Research Council (ERC)<fnref n="4" /> and focussing on the Gupta
and early post-Gupta period. The epigraphic sources relevant to the
project were encoded to become part of a database of inscriptions
called Siddham. At present, project DHARMA (2019-2026), likewise
funded by the ERC,<fnref n="5" /> continues to expand the digital archive of South
and Southeast Asian epigraphic texts. Inscriptions newly encoded for
DHARMA employ a slightly different standard, but the Siwani plates
are one of the few Siddham editions that have already been revised
to the DHARMA conventions.<fnref n="6" />

At first sight, this digital edition, illustrated in Figure 5, differs
from those of Fleet and Mirashi only in superficial details. To be sure,
the text has been read with full accuracy by the great epigraphists of
the 19th and 20th centuries. The edition is complemented by a
translation and, apparently as its sole novel feature, an apparatus
criticus documenting the readings offered by previous editors. In order
to illuminate what makes it essentially new and different from earlier
editions, I now wish to examine how some aspects of the ideal of ‘a
scholarly edition of a premodern inscription written in an Indic

<footnote n="4">⁴ Grant agreement no. 609823.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ Grant agreement no. 809994. See Griffiths (2023) about DHARMA and predecessor projects.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ Siddham digital edition by Dániel Balogh: https://siddham.network/ inscription/in00163. DHARMA digital edition by Dániel Balogh: https:// dharmalekha.info/texts/INSSiddham00163.</footnote>
〈Page 3v〉

(23) pūrvveņa| sva-sīmā-par¿a? (i)cch¿a? (e)dena _ karañjaviraka-taṭe| Atrāsmat-santakā(ḥ)

(24) sarvvāddhyakṣa-n¿a? (i)yoga-n¿a? (i)yuktāḥ Ājñā-sañcāri- kulaputrādhikṛtāḥ bhaṭāḥ

(25) {ṣ}chāttrāś ca viśru○ta-pūrvvayā _ Ājñayā _ Ājñāpayitavyāḥ<,> vidita-

(26) m astu ¿t? (v)ah yathaiṣo (‘)smābhiḥ Ātmano dharmmāyur-bbala- vijayaiśvaryya-v[‖r‖]ivṛ<ḍ>dhaye

(27) lh¿a? (ā)mutra-hitārttham āt¿v? (m)ānugrahāya| vaijayike dharmma- sthāne| A-bhaṭa

(23) pūrvveņa M ◊ purvveņa F • Fleet does not emend, so this is probably a typo in his edition.
— -sīmā- M ◊ -simā- F • Fleet does not emend, so this is probably a typo in his edition. —
karañjaviraka- • Fleet tentatively offers the alternative reading karañjaciraka-. This cannot be
excluded altogether, but does not seem likely. — -santakā(ḥ) • The visarga is not visible in the
estampage, but both previous editors show it.

(24) sarvvāddhyakṣa F ◊ sarvvādhyaḥṣa M. — -n¿a?(i)yuktāḥ F ◊ -niyuktāḥ M.
— -kulaputrādhikṛtāḥ F ◊ -kulaputrādhikṛtā M.

(26) -v[‖r‖]ivṛ<ḍ>dhaye M ◊ -v[‖r‖]⟨ri⟩vṛ<ḍ>dhaye F.

(27) -sthāne| F ◊ -sthāne M • As both F and M note, atisṛṣṭaḥ or an equivalent is missing after this word. In fact, related grants typically have apūrvva-datyā udaka-pūrvvam atisṛṣṭaḥ. This might be a case of eyeskip omission where instead of continuing with apūrvva, the scribe jumped to abhaṭa-. Compare the omission in line 37.

<caption>Figure 5. The text as presented in a digital edition</caption>

language' have changed over time as a result of the co-evolution of
the discipline's paradigm and the technology that supports it.

When copperplate inscriptions came to notice in the days of
Company and Crown Raj, at least some of them were expected to
have direct relevance to legal and administrative matters. McLeod
learned of the Siwani charter because it was 'supposed to be a *jatas*
or *sanad* confirming lands granted by former *Goand* chiefs, but wholly
illegible to the pandits' (Prinsep 1836a: 726), and similar circumstances
accompanied the emergence of other copperplate sets, such as the
early Rāṣṭrakūṭa charter now known as the Sangalooda grant of
Nannarāja (Venkataramayya 1951). Manaton Ommaney, Esquire of
the Civil Service, who sent this inscription to Prinsep, reports that a
Goswami of Multai (MP) had brought the plates to him 'as his *sanad*
and begged me to use my influence in procuring the restoration of
his rent-free village [...] The plates he said were proof of right; for no
one could read them, they were so old and authentic' (Prinsep 1837a:
869). As for Prinsep himself, he seems rather indifferent to such a
mundane purpose, and explains his motives as follows (Prinsep 1836a:
340):

Fearing that many of the inscriptions with copies of which I have been
favored [...] may be mislaid or lost sight of unless committed to print, I
am led to anticipate the full explanation which many of them doubtless
might receive from those who have learning, industry, and will, to
decypher them, but want the necessary leisure at present to undertake
the task,—by transferring them to the stone at once, and recording them
in the Journal along with the notes that accompanied them, where they
may be at all times available when accidental discovery may open a clue
to their interpretation.

While couched as an apology for publishing lithographs of
inscriptions in advance of in-depth study, the above rationale clearly
expresses a generic drive to accumulate and disseminate knowledge
for the sake of knowledge or, as Prinsep put it elsewhere, ‘We build
not fanciful theories, but rather collect good stones for others to fashion
[*...*] to the benefit and pleasure of mankind’ (Prinsep 1837c: ix). It is
not for me to explore if—and how deeply—such laudable concerns
were enmeshed with the machinery and discourse of colonial
governance. Prinsep’s professed disinterested eagerness to enable
continuing discovery certainly did not lack a sprinkling of
competitiveness and national pride. In connection to the Aśokan
inscription on the Allahabad pillar, he observes that ‘it seems almost
a stigma on the learned of our own country that this should have
remained so long an enigma to scholars; and the object of the present
notice is to invite fresh attention to the subject, lest the indefatigable
students of Bonn or Berlin should run away with the honor of first
making it known to the learned world’ (Prinsep 1834: 118). This did
not, however, prevent him and his contemporaries from sharing
knowledge with the general public and actively helping any member
of the small community of specialists. As he says elsewhere, ‘at this
moment a French gentleman of fortune well grounded in Sanskrit
and other oriental studies at Paris, is come to Calcutta [...] We wish
[him] every success, we proffer him every aid; yet we do so not
without a blush that any thing should be left for a foreigner to explore!
(Prinsep 1837c: vi–vii).

The ground motive to preserve and share knowledge has evidently
persisted to this day, and has perhaps also shed some of its
entanglement with less lofty goals. What has, however, changed greatly
over time, is the underlying paradigm that determines what is
endorsed as constituting knowledge. The general, and grossly
oversimplified, trend was for scholars of earlier times to conceive of
history as an objectively existing mesh of facts—such as names, places
and dates—which are obscured but potentially discoverable, and of
inscriptional and other sources as imperfectly transmitted clues to
these facts (cf. Salomon 1998: 228–231). We have all seen remarks to
the effect that an inscription ‘contains nothing else of historical interest’
in the pages of *Epigraphia Indica* or, indeed, of the *Journal of the Asiatic
Society of Bengal*.<fnref n="7" /> This notion of history is well served by the perception
of an inscription as a message whose information content must be
extracted through eliminating the noise in the transmission channel.
The early scholars were concerned foremost with the linguistic content
of primary texts, abstracted from their tangible manifestations as
inscriptions or manuscripts. Accordingly, Prinsep ignores many
punctuation marks present in the Siwani plates;<fnref n="8" /> where he perceives
a scribal error, he changes the text to what he (or his pandit) deems
to be correct Sanskrit and/or the intended message of the composer,

<footnote n="7">⁷ Compare Prinsep’s (1836a: 728) remark on the inscriptionshowcased here: ‘What would have added still more to the value of the [Siwani charter], is the exact date it cites, were it not unfortunately in an unknown era.’</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ Where the original has a double *daṇḍa* (not occurring in the excerpt), it is replicated in Prinsep’s edition, while where it has a dot or a dash (represented by dots in the eye copy), these are ignored in the transliteration.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹ Thus, in the first line of his text, he prints *paricchadena* for the original *paracchadena*; *sāmantakāḥ* for *santakāḥ*; in the second line, *niyoganiyuktāḥ* for *nayoganayuktāḥ*, etc.</footnote>
doing so without any indication that he has intervened;⁹ and he
likewise does not indicate where his reading is tentative, even though
some of his readings appear to be educated guesses for the value of
an unfamiliar character.<fnref n="10" />

Palaeographic study was foremost a prop to decipherment in
Prinsep's days, and a means of relative dating and geographic
localisation in subsequent times. The physical characteristics of the
inscription as an actual object were all but ignored by Prinsep, but
were duly recognised as subjects of scholarly interest shortly afterward.
The introduction to Fleet's edition of the Siwani plates provided a
detailed description of the plates' appearance and dimensions, followed
by a palaeographic analysis and observations on orthography (which
are repeated verbatim in Mirashi's edition). Fleet also made an effort
to document the context, disclosing the name and accurate location
of the village of the plates' owner. In part because most early
epigraphists were philologists working in an office with no access to
the originals, the eventual analysis of features extraneous to the text
was—and is—often left to archaeologists and art historians. This
sundering of disciplines is to some extent inevitable and may be
perceived as the price of increasing specialisation, negotiable only
through interdisciplinary approaches and teamwork (cf. Matsumoto
2022: 288–289). Nonetheless, the material aspect of inscriptions is
now a fruitful area of study not only on its own, but especially in
combination with their textual aspect (e.g. Hawkes and Abbas 2016).
Fleet, moreover, attempts to identify one of the geographical names
in the text, and Mirashi continues in this vein, suggesting further
identifications for some toponyms. His greatest improvement vis-à-
vis Fleet is a far better understanding of the technical terms describing
the rights and privileges associated with the donation than was
possible in the nineteenth century.

Communication models have evolved to recognise the role of the
receiver as an active constructor of meaning, and historiography

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ Thus, in the first line, *karajāviraka* for *karañjaviraka*, and in the second line, *ājñāsatkāri* for *ājñāsañcāri* are probably misreadings rather than silent emendations.</footnote>
encompasses an ever-broadening range of potential subjects of study, frequently far less concrete than those foregrounded in previous centuries (e.g. Ali 2000: 165–170). The corollary of this is that insights gained from acknowledging the involvement of social and cognitive factors ought to qualify and nuance our approach to historical facts, without disqualifying the empirical stance (cf. Salomon 1998: chapter 7, esp. pp. 231–232). The airy edifices of modern historical study could not have been erected had Prinsep and his colleagues not begun collecting ‘good stones for others to fashion,’ and cannot continue to be built unless this groundwork is carried on with unrelenting detail and rigour. With respect to the edition of inscriptions, ‘detail’ encompasses not only the meaning of the intangible text, but also the features of the tangible original, including its physical characteristics, its built and natural settings, and its history; while ‘rigour,’ in addition to diligence and accuracy in collecting and reporting such information, involves transparency and intellectual honesty in the separation of data as received from information as interpreted (or constructed) by the editor.

Hand in hand with the evolution of the scholarly paradigm, technological advance has had profound effects on epigraphic studies, directly—as on the means of preparing visual documentation—and indirectly, by way of the infrastructure grown up around us, which makes it vastly easier, faster, and cheaper in terms of matīriel and effort, to carry on research both in the field and at the desk. Already in the nineteenth century, documenting the physical appearance of inscribed objects was—as evidenced by Prinsep’s inclusion of eye copies of the Siwani plates—recognised as a crucial element of the desirable detail. It provides a surrogate in case the original is damaged or lost sight of, and facilitates access, since it is normally much more costly and onerous to retrieve the one and only original for study than to pick up one of many specimens on paper. But to print such an illustration, artistic skill was required both for the initial creation of a drawing and for its reproduction on a lithographic plate. The great technical innovation of the day was that one could draw on transfer paper out in the field, and the result, ‘packed in a tin roll,
may be subjected to a journey of 1000 miles, either in the hottest or
the dampest period of the year with impunity' (Prinsep 1836b: ix),
thereby eliminating the need to recreate a drawing for the lithographic
process. Mechanical reproductions, such as inked estampages (a
technique already well established in Mediterranean epigraphy and
Egyptology), were of course also made when feasible (e.g. Burnell
1870), but for printing, they had to be hand-traced on paper.<fnref n="11" /> By the
time of Fleet and the *Corpus Inscriptionum*, photolithography (and
later, offset printing) had become available, greatly increasing the
accuracy and reducing the expense of printing facsimiles, such as the
one in Figure 6.

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>Figure 6. Fleet's estampage (1888, Pl. 35)</figcaption></figure>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ The estampages of the Allahabad pillar’s inscriptions, comprising 24 sheets with a total area of almost 15 square metres, were prepared in triplicate. One on paper and one on cloth were dispatched to Calcutta, while another paper specimen was retained on site in case the first two did not survive the 800-kilometre journey (Prinsep 1837b: 964). That the risk of such losses was real is driven home by the fate of the ‘very large and valuable collection of sculptures, coins, and other objects of antiquarian interest [...] together with books, papers, note-books, photographic negatives, etc.’ amassed by Prinsep’s protégé and successor Alexander Cunningham, which were lost in a shipwreck near Sri Lanka in 1885, on the way from India to England (Anonymous 1894: 175). Intriguingly, the remains of the SS Indus, which carried Cunningham’s collection, have probably been found (Muthucumarana 2019: 1667–1672). Continuing maritime excavations of the wreck may in fact bring back to light some of the treasures that have resisted seawater exposure.</footnote>
Today, many compact cameras and even some mobile phones can
snap print-quality images at no cost other than the initial investment.
These pictures can be displayed forthwith on a screen, conveyed almost
instantaneously over a global wireless network, reproduced flawlessly
any number of times and practically for free, edited swiftly, cheaply
and without detriment to the original, and printed on physical media
at reasonable prices. As most epigraphists know from experience,
photos—no matter how excellent they may be—are not ideal for the
reading of inscriptions, since they are a two-dimensional rendering of
one view of a three-dimensional original, so the details they capture
vary depending on the lighting at the moment the picture was taken.
Recent advances in optical technology and computer vision have
brought us techniques such as photogrammetry and reflectance
transformation imaging (e.g. Matsumoto 2022: 291–292, Seales and
Chapman 2023: 131–136). Generating a three-dimensional model based
on a set of photos taken from varying angles, or from the same
viewpoint with varying lighting, these methods require more
resources, effort and expertise than clicking a few pictures, but offer
extraordinary visualisation of three-dimensional objects with simulated
lighting and surface properties. This burgeoning of imaging
technology continues with no end in sight. Indeed, it is a tad frustrating
to anticipate that the best visual documentation recorded with state-
of-the-art equipment may be found as inadequate tomorrow as we
find Prinsep’s eye copy today. Still, multiply redundant photography
can go some way toward compensating for the shortcomings of any
individual image.

The same trend applies to scholarly publications. To specialise in
the antiquity of South Asia no longer requires a most extraordinary
combination of talent, dedication, privilege and circumstance.
Generating new scholarly output still (or increasingly) necessitates
specialised training and continues to be labour-intensive, but the
accumulated mass of previous scholarship can now be stored,
reproduced and disseminated with a far smaller investment of
resources. Prinsep's readiness to proffer every aid to colleagues of
any nationality has bloomed into initiatives for open access, opening
up unprecedented opportunities for the now much broader
international community of researchers to collaborate and in general
to build upon each other's work.

The resulting deluge of material—both raw data such as images,
and processed information such as scholarly articles—has
fundamentally transformed the practice of armchair research. With
lightning-fast searching of digitally stored data, productivity has
increased greatly, but selective retrieval has become one of the most
pressing problems. A nineteenth-century practitioner in our field could
reasonably be expected to be familiar with the profiles of all journals
relevant to his work and the research topics of all his peers, and to be
able to locate almost everything worth knowing about a topic (or all
existing visual documentation of an object) after a quick look through
some catalogues, indices and tables of contents, if not from personal
memory. Doing so has become all but inconceivable: to be efficient,
searching must take place on the digital plane. Even with the explosive
advance of artificial intelligence in our days, it is uncertain when, if
ever, a computer will be able to analyse massive amounts of
unclassified images or diverse publications written for human readers.
For the time being at least, such material—in the interpretation of
which the human scholar deploys a vast store of contextual
knowledge—must be ‘pre-digested’ in order for the computer to be
able to deal with it.

One straightforward step in this direction is to associate metadata
with the material. Metadata or 'data about data' can take diverse
forms and be employed for a variety of purposes (e.g. Gilliland 2008,
Riley 2017), but all share the common purpose of recording and
systematising additional information about an item of data. On the
one hand, computer files of various kinds generally carry
administrative metadata with basic information about the file itself:
when it was created, when it has been modified, what kind of data it
contains, etc. Image recording equipment such as a digital camera
adds further technical metadata such as camera model, image
resolution, exposure, light sensitivity, focal length, GPS coordinates,
etc., while word processing files can include descriptive metadata
such as the name of the author, the title, or keywords. More germanely
to the present topic, the term 'metadata' as generally applied in a
cultural heritage context also includes data which are 'meta' to an
object or a primary source text, but are themselves subjects of scholarly
study in the more comprehensive paradigm of antiquarian scholarship.
An epigraphic text's metadata may thus include items like the
language, topic, protagonists, or sectarian affiliation of the text, and
an inscribed object's metadata may record a wealth of information
such as object classification, material, creation technique, dimensions,
findspot, archaeological context, current location, and so forth. While
most technical metadata can be (and often are) generated automatically
by the hardware and software employed for creating digital data,
descriptive metadata must as a rule be created by a human being
exercising judgement based on expertise.

Metadata of all sorts are an infinitely versatile and expandable
equivalent to catalogue cards, which may be used to look up entities
(photos, scholarly articles, epigraphic texts, inscribed objects, etc.) on
the basis of selected criteria. Thanks to computer processing, the
metadata of a vast number of entities can be checked in next to no
time, provided that two essential conditions are met. Even if profuse
metadata accurately recorded by an expert are available for a data
corpus, in order to be useful, those metadata must on the one hand
conform to a structured and coherent ontological model, and on the
other hand follow a standard classification. With the extensiveness of
text and artefact metadata desirable in epigraphic research, this is no
small task (e.g. Mannocci, Casarosa, Manghi, and Zoppi 2014), and
has not yet been fully achieved for Indic epigraphy. The introductions
to Fleet and Mirashi's editions provide copious detail about the text
and the inscribed artefact. This is grist for the mill of other scholars
but, even though it comprises metadata in the second sense, it cannot
be parsed by a computer confidently enough to afford search or
analysis in a corpus of such editions. One essential feature of a digital

<footnote n="12">¹² The DHARMA edition of the Siwani plates is no fitted out with descriptive metadata as yet, and although many other digital editions of the DHARMA project are, a web-based user interface that will allow the reader to take full advantage of those metadata is yet to materialise. Metadata are available in the Siddham edition.</footnote>
edition is thus the embedding of metadata in a standardised structure,
pertaining both to the technical details of the edition and to the
documentation of the text and the physical object, and linked to other
digital entities such as visual representations.¹²

Turning back to the texts themselves, I shall now explore how
technology can promote detail and rigour in editing. Like any scholarly
article and indeed like any document, an epigraphic edition can of
course be converted to bits of information interpretable by specialised
software, which allows a reader to interact with the data by rendering
them visually on a screen or, as the case may be, a paper printout. If
we had a large corpus of such digitised data, say, one obtained by
running optical character recognition on scans of Fleet's and Mirashi's
volumes of the *Corpus Inscriptionum* and the texts published by Prinsep,
querying it for information would still be difficult. First of all, the
same word is often represented by three different strings of characters
in these three subsets of our corpus. Editors must transliterate the
text of inscriptions into a form that can be read by an audience wider
than the handful of people able todecipher the original writing. A
prerequisite to transliteration is a writing system whose symbols can
be mapped one on one to the characters of the inscriptions. Modern
Devanāgarī (as in Prinsep's and Mirashi's text) is a convenient pre-
existing example of such a system. As long as Sanskrit inscriptions
are concerned, Devanāgarī transliteration and Romanisation are about
equally viable, with different advantages and disadvantages. The
characters of most Brāhmī-derived scripts have straightforward
correspondence to Devanāgarī, so a reader already familiar with that
script—anyone raised in the Hindi and Marathi belt, most Indians
raised in other parts, and all foreign scholars educated in Sanskrit or
a related language—can make sense of the transliteration without
any additional training. Then again, as soon as a wider audience—for
instance non-Indian scholars of other disciplines such as history or
linguistics—or a broader set of source languages—including, say,
Kannada, Tamil, Burmese or Javanese—is involved, Devanāgarī's
suitability declines. It is generally feasible to transliterate non-Sanskritic
inscriptions into the standard script of a closely related modern
language, but doing so has a sharp impact on accessibility to readers
without a background in that particular language. It is perhaps for
this reason that in international forums, Romanisation (transliteration
into letters of the Latin script) is increasingly preferred. The foremost
hurdle to this solution is of course the fact that the Latin alphabet has
fewer characters than Indic scripts.<fnref n="13" /> Enriching the Latin letters with
diacritical marks (as in Fleet's text and the digital edition) is a long-
established tradition, but it requires a consistently applied and
understood convention.

Indeed, such a convention was proposed already by Sir William
Jones (1788), but failed to gain widespread acceptance. Prinsep renders
the first word of the Siwani inscription as *drīshtam*, which is much
like how Jones would have transliterated it, except that Prinsep uses
*t* (indistinguishable from the dental *t*) where Jones would have
employed *t'* to represent the unvoiced retroflex stop. It may be argued
that the distinction is redundant here, since *sh* invariably represents
the retroflex sibilant, and Sanskrit phonotactics forbid the occurrence
of a dental *t* after this sound.<fnref n="14" /> However, an ideal transliteration system
should be interpretable and reversible without calling on context. The
traditional transliteration convention employed with slight variations
in Monier-Williams's *Sanskrit Dictionary* as well as in the *Corpus
Inscriptionum Indicarum* series (including Fleet's edition of the Siwani
plates) and the pages of *Epigraphia Indica*, to name just a few, would
show the same word as *drishṭam*, allowing the transliteration to be

<footnote n="13">¹³ Less conspicuously, the problem applies to modern Devanāgarī too. Editions in that script lack a consistent way of transliterating some characters that occur in inscriptions, such as the *upadhmānīya* and *jihvāmūlīya*, Dravidian consonants not found in Sanskrit but nonetheless occasionally occurring in Sanskrit inscriptions, and special final forms of consonants (as opposed to those written by adding a *virāma* sign).</footnote>

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ This may have been Prinsep’s rationale, for in transliterating the dynasty’s name as *Vákátaka*, he shows that he has the means to distinguish the dental from the retroflex, although not by the same diacritic as Jones. A typographic error in Prinsep’s article is likewise possible, but unlikely, as the word *drīshtam* occurs with a plain *t* no less than three times.</footnote>
reversible without the need for contextual rules, and to be searchable
by computer. The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration
renders it as *drśtam*, reducing the number of digraphs in the
transliteration, while the ISO-15919 standard (used in the digital
edition) represents it as *drśtam*, increasing consistency in the way a
given diacritical mark modifies any Latin letter to which it is attached.<fnref n="15" />

Even with an ideal set of conventions, the act of transliteration is
itself interpretive: a written text is never altogether unequivocal, and
extracting meaning from its glyphs involves knowledge not only of
the script, but also of the language and the context. This is
particularly—but not only—so when the original has been damaged
or was imperfectly engraved to begin with.<fnref n="16" /> The editor’s interpretation
of the text’s meaning comes more strongly into play when there is
reason to suspect that the scribe (or the composer) committed mistakes
beyond the level of a misshapen character, so that the text requires
emendation in order to be intelligible, or to carry the meaning
presumed to have been intended by its originator. In order to provide
information synoptically and separably about the received particulars
of the tangible text on the one hand, and the editorial version of the
intangible text on the other, scholarly editions of epigraphic texts

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ The consistency of diacritical marks is irrelevant to computer processing and impacts only the intuitiveness of the transliteration system and the ease with which it can be learned. Digraphs, the use of two Latin characters for a single phoneme of the original language (limited in the latter two systems to the diphthongs and aspirated consonants of Indic languages) do affect computer processing (think of searching a Sanskrit corpus for the word *hanti* and getting results that include *gacchanti*, *tiṣṭhanti*, etc.), but with the processing power now available to all computer users, software solutions for circumventing such problems are feasible. See also Scharf and Hyman (2012: 21–46) for a critical review of transliteration systems and a contrary argument for a standard that involves no digraphs.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ A good case in point for ambiguity prevailing even if neither damage, nor scribal inadequacy are present is the identical appearance of the glyphs for the initial vowel *a* and the syllable *su* in the script of the Siwani plates (the illustration in Figure 3 does not include an instance of *su*, but its shape can be inferred from *stū*, the second character in the fourth line). The last word on the plate illustrated here can be read as either *abhaṭa* or *subhaṭa*, both meaningful in Sanskrit, and only context can tip the balance.</footnote>
usually employ markup in addition to written commentary. The term
'markup' refers to a set of conventional symbols or other devices
employed by editors to convey supplementary information about
specific parts of a written text. At a superficial glance, there is no
markup in Prinsep's presentation of the Siwani plates, but in fact
even the spaces between words qualify as such. They are—by and
large—absent from the tangible original, and the supplementary
information the spaces in the publication convey is that these are the
boundaries of words in the intangible text as interpreted by the editor.<fnref n="17" />
Typesetting into lines is another form of markup: in this respect
Prinsep chose to adhere to the received tangible text, with each line
of his edition homologous to one line engraved on the plate, whereas
written lines—whether on a stone slab, a copperplate or a paper
page—are irrelevant to the intangible text.

The markup in Fleet and Mirashi's editions—and in modern
editions in general—is much more conspicuous. All include various
kinds of brackets and some additional symbols to indicate details
such as which parts of the text are notclearly legible, which are wholly
illegible (lacunae), what might have been written that is now illegible
/restoration), and what ought to have been written instead of something
legible but unintelligible or unexpected (emendation).<fnref n="18" /> Fleet, like
Prinsep, provides spaces between words, also adding double hyphens
(equals signs) at word boundaries which are separable in Romanisation
but fall within a single *akṣara* of the original, and hyphens to analyse
compound words into members. His edition, moreover, employs
uppercase initials to indicate where according to his interpretation a
sentence begins, and a combination of an uppercase initial and bold
face to show what he takes to be proper names.

Suppose that we have surmounted the problem of transliteration
and converted all texts in our hypothetical corpus to a single system,

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ Prinsep's spacing is, however, not entirely consistent, perhaps due to his
incomplete understanding of the text.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ Bracket-based markup has been adopted from Mediterranean and Near Eastern
epigraphy, for which it was eventually standardised in the Leiden Conventions
(Van Groningen 1932). However, Indological usage retains a different, and
not entirely consistent, set of conventions (Salomon 1998: 163).</footnote>
such as ISO-15919. If we now wanted to retrieve, for instance, all
occurrences of the Sanskrit word *niyoga* to study their context, the
search would miss the instance in the Siwani plates (in the second
line of the excerpt, line 24 of the inscription) in each of the editions
illustrated here. In Fleet's edition, it appears (after conversion to ISO-
15919) as n[i*]yoga to inform the reader that the vowel *mātrā* for i was
omitted by the engraver and the vowel has been supplied by the
editor. The same annotation takes the form na(ni)yoga in Mirashi's
edition, and n?a?(i)yoga in the Dharma edition. Like milk mixed with
water, particular kinds of brackets placed at particular points are
intermingled with the text's characters. The reader needs only to learn
the markup conventions to become a *hamsa* and filter the milk out of
the water, but a mechanical search algorithm is incapable of this.

To understand how a true digital edition circumvents this problem
that cripples digitised classical editions, we need to look at how
markup can be applied to digital data. Documents stored in digital
form typically carry their own kind of markup, encoded in a formal
markup language and serving to instruct the machine how various
parts of the text must appear on a screen or in print, for example in
bold face or regular. This approach, usually called *presentational markup*,<fnref n="19" /> is employed in Word and other popular WYSIWYG ('what
you see is what you get') word-processing software. Some computer
applications, such as TeX, instead employ *procedural markup* comprised
of instructions for generating a formatted document from the text,
and permit (or require) the end user to produce and interact with that
markup. Computer markup (or encoding) is also interspersed with
the text's characters, but remains essentially distinct from it, like rice
and sesame seeds. As a result, the machine can easily sift one out of
the other and hide the markup from the end user's eyes, manifesting
only its effects in the formatting of the text, and can also search
selectively for segments of texts marked up in a particular way. Yet
these kinds of markup are quite independent of the editorial markup
of a scholarly edition, even though the two can occasionally overlap,

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ The kinds of markup approaches mentioned here follow the typology introduced by Coombs, Renear, and DeRose (1987).</footnote>
as when bold face is used in Fleet's edition to highlight proper names to the reader. Even so, searching for bold face in our hypothetical digitised corpus would not be sufficient to retrieve proper names in the Sanskrit texts, because it would also return anything else with bold formatting, such as headings, or proper names in Fleet's English commentaries and translations.

The distinction between the tangible and intangible aspects of a text apply not only to premodern source texts, but to any text including scholarly editions. Presentational (and procedural) markup is concerned with the tangible, while *descriptive markup* (also called conceptual markup) is concerned with the intangible. Instead of specifying details such as 'this is left-aligned in 16-point italic Times' or 'this is bold,' it associates a conceptual classification with chunks of text, such as 'this is a top-level heading' or 'this is a proper name.'<fnref n="20" /> Instructions for presentation—the rules for generating a tangible text—are handled separately. The versatility of descriptive markup brings vast advantages, such as ensuring consistency of formatting,<fnref n="21" /> facilitating various ways of presentation without the need to re-format the document,<fnref n="22" /> allowing the selective extraction of specific entities,<fnref n="23" /> and moreover, enabling us to apply conceptual labels—that is, metadata—to anything in the text that can be conceptualised.

Classical scholarly editions are produced with a view toward the tangible: a particular way of presentation in a printed medium, in which the ink on the paper is simultaneously the stored representation of the edition's data (coded in graphic symbols interpretable by a person familiar with those symbols) and the interface through which the reader interacts with the data. This 'classical' approach to

<footnote n="20">²⁰ Styles in WYSIWYG word processors and macros in LaTeX may be employed like descriptive markup.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">²¹ Everyone is familiar with poorly formatted documents where each heading is subtly different from the other.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">²² Consider attempting to read a PDF file (involving procedural markup) on the screen of a smartphone, and compare the experience with reading modern web pages, which usually employ something approaching descriptive markup coupled with different presentation instructions depending on the kind of device on which they are displayed.</footnote>

<footnote n="23">²³ For example to generate tables of contents or indices of proper names.</footnote>
producing editions, which has been described as output-driven
(Rehbein 2010: 2), now has a ‘digital’ alternative, in which the main
driving forces are on the one hand the input, namely the features of
the tangible original; and on the other hand the user, whose anticipated
interest determines which of these features are relevant and how they
are categorised. The real sea change from digitised editions to digital
editions takes place through shifting much of the scholarly annotation
of the edited text (i.e. the editorial markup) from the tangible plane
to the intangible by implementing it as computer-based descriptive
markup. Instead of ‘this is in square brackets’ and ‘this is in round
parentheses,’ it says, ‘this is an editorial restoration’ and ‘that is an
editorial emendation.’ This shift makes it possible to process the text
independently of the markup (for instance to search for strings in the
text regardless of the markup applied to them), to search specifically
for marked-up concepts, and to visualise the markup in a multiplicity
of forms depending on the needs of the end user.

Adding descriptive markup to a wide gamut of texts is
tremendously useful in a variety of fields (many of them involving
far more stakeholders and vastly greater business opportunities than
Indic epigraphy), from digital publishing to text mining and artificial
intelligence. As a result, already since the 1980s the Text Encoding
Initiative or TEI (e.g. Burnard 2014) has been developing standards
for doing so in the XML (Extensible Markup Language) format. Figure
7 shows part of the actual digital edition of the Siwani plates
corresponding to the edition excerpts.<fnref n="24" /> The characters shown in black
are those that belong to the inscription, while the rest, enclosed in
angle brackets and highlighted in colours, comprise the computer-
readable descriptive markup in XML. Each unit of markup, called an
element, is generally comprised of two such tags: an opening tag to
indicate its beginning in the text (with a label in angle brackets), and
an end tag (with the same label, preceded by a slash within the angle
brackets). When an element does not contain any text, a single tag

<footnote n="24">²⁴ The code shown here has been slightly simplified to serve better as an
illustration. The code responsible for the 'critical apparatus' is separate
from the code for the text, and is not shown here.</footnote>
can be used for both the beginning and the end, formulated by adding
a slash after the label within the angle brackets, as in <space/> in the
figure. Some of the elements include *attributes* with various values
(after the label within the opening tag), which are used to encode
further details, for instance the number of the element <lb/> ('line
beginning') marking where an originally inscribed line starts, or the
information that the space in line 25 is in fact the hole that serves for
binding the copperplates.

The syntax of XML as a markup language determines the general
rules for the use of elements and attributes, while what makes it an
*extensible* markup language is that elements, attributes, and the specific
rules for their use in various contexts are defined separately. This is
where the TEI comes in, providing a complex set of definitions and
usage rules for the conceptual encoding of texts. Because the encoding
solutions potentially available in TEI are extremely versatile and
manifold, they are best applied in any specific field of text processing
as a subset tuned to the needs of that field by reducing the number
of conceptual categories that receive markup and mapping these to
concrete encoding solutions. The EpiDoc standard (e.g. Bodard 2010)
is such a subset of the TEI standard, specifically developed for the
encoding of epigraphic documents. The DHARMA project's epigraphic
editions are encoded according to a convention (Balogh and Griffiths
2020)<fnref n="25" /> that is a further concretisation of EpiDoc adapted to South
and Southeast Asian inscriptions, primarily those written in an Indic
(Brāhmī-derived) script.

A further advantage of descriptive markup is a reduction of
ambiguity. When confronted with bracket-based markup, readers must
sometimes rely on context and their own expertise to determine its

<footnote n="25"><sup>25</sup> An updated and revised version is currently in preparation.</footnote>

<footnote n="26"><sup>26</sup> Fleet, for example, employs hyphens at compound boundaries (e.g. *sva-simā* in line 23), at the ends of epigraphic lines that fall inside a word (e.g. *vidita-m* in lines 25–26), and at the ends of lines in his printed edition that fall inside a word (e.g. *âdhi-kritāh* in line 24). When there is a hyphen at the end of an epigraphic or printed line, readers are left to their own devices to decide whether a compound boundary is also present (as at the printed line ending with *bbala-* in line 26 and the end of the epigraphic line 27 with *bhaṭa-*) or not (as at the printed line ending with *âdhi-* in line 24, or the end of the epigraphic line 25 with *vidita-*).</footnote>
exact meaning, and may need to refer to the visual material provided
with the edition to be certain, because the markup conventions vary to
some extent from editor to editor, and even within a single edition,
some symbols are used for more than one purpose²⁶ or bear no
indication of their scope.<fnref n="27" /> To return again to the word *niyoga*, written
as *nayoga* in our inscription excerpt, we can see in Figure 3 that Fleet
shows it as n[i*]yôga. By his conventions, text followed by an asterisk
in square brackets means a scribal omission, and his annotation describes
what happened in the process of writing: the engraver omitted the *i*
marker. However, reconstructing the received text from his edition
necessitates expert knowledge. The specialist reader is of course aware
that the omission of a dependent vowel entails the presence of the
default vowel *a* in the same syllable, unlike the omission of an
independent vowel or a consonant (for which compare vivṛi[d*]dhayê
in line 26 of Fleet's edition), in which case the received text can be
reconstructed by ignoring the editorial restoration without putting
anything in its place.<fnref n="28" /> For a computer to do so, complex rules must be
formalised.

All these ambiguities can be eliminated by the consistent use of
conceptual markup where, for instance in an editorial alteration of
the text, the scope of the original and editorial versions must always
be explicit. Thus, in the figure, the encoding of this word as
n<choice><sic>a</sic><corr>i</corr></choice>yoga means that after
the letter *n*, there exist alternative versions of the text (with a 'choice'

<footnote n="27">²⁷ Both Fleet and Mirashi employ parentheses to propose emendations, as in correcting the inscribed *tāh* to *vāh* in line 26. The implicit understanding is that the text shown in parentheses is to replace the same number of *akṣaras* (or transliterated characters) in the received text, so emendations involving a change in the number of *akṣaras* or characters need to be clarified in footnotes. Not all editors, however, do so consistently.</footnote>

<footnote n="28">²⁸ In Mirashi’s edition, the same editorial intervention is shown as a correction rather than a restored omission: na(ni)yoga. In his Devanāgarī text, it is of course more convenient to show every editorial annotation on the level of the *akṣara*. This way, it is quite clear that the received text was *nayoga* while the corrected text is *niyoga*, but the consonant *n* must be redundantly present in both versions, and concerns about the scope of the correction, as in the previous note, still apply.</footnote>
<pb n="3v"/>(<lb n="23"/>pūrvveņa<g type="comma">.</g> sva-sīmā-
par<choice><sic>a</sic><corr>i</corr></choice>cch<choice><sic>a</sic>
<corr>e</corr></choice>dena <space/> karañjaviraka-taṭe<g
type="comma">.</g> Atrāsmat-santakā<unclear>h</unclear> <lb
n="24"/>sarvvāddhyakṣa-n<choice><sic>a</sic><corr>i</corr></choice>yoga-
n<choice><sic>a</sic><corr>i</corr></choice>yuktāḥ Ājñā-sañcāri-
kulaputrādhikṛtāḥ bhaṭāḥ <lb n="25"/><surplus>ś</surplus>chāttrāś ca viśru<space
type="binding-hole"/>ta-pūrvvayā <space/> Ājñayā <space/>
Ājñāpayitavyāḥ <supplied reason="subaudible">.</supplied> vidita<lb n="26"
break="no"/>m astu <choice><sic>t</sic><corr>v</corr></choice>aḥ yathaiṣo
<supplied reason="subaudible">'</supplied>smābhiḥ Ātmano dharmmāyur-bbala-
vijayaiśvaryya-v<del>r</del>ivṛ<supplied reason="omitted">d</supplied>dhaye <lb
n="27"/>Ih<choice><sic>a</sic><corr>ā</corr></choice>mutra-hitārttham
āt<choice><sic>v</sic><corr>m</corr></choice>ānugrahāya<g
type="dash">.</g> vaijayike dharmma-sthāne<g type="dash">.</g> A-bhaṭa

<caption>Figure 7. The text as encoded in the digital edition</caption>

available between them), namely one exactly as inscribed ('sic,' i.e.
the reading *a*) and one as corrected by the editor ('corr,' i.e. the reading
*i'), after which the segment involving a choice ends before the text
continues with *yoga*. In the snippet of the digital edition rendered for
the human reader (Figure 5), I have shown this as na?i)yoga, but it
must be kept in mind that not every detail which is tagged in the
encoded text needs to be shown and distinguished in any particular
rendering: the intangible digital edition can be translated into various
tangible documents custom-tailored to the user's needs. For instance,
the code excerpt in Figure 7 can be rendered as a diplomatic edition
prioritising the tangible original, as in Figure 8, where editorial changes
to the text are hidden except for spacing and hyphenation, but the
loci where the editor finds the received text problematic are still marked
for the reader's attention; or as a 'logical edition' prioritising the
intangible, as in Figure 9, where the text is laid out in accordance
with its semantic structure (but still labelled for the original
document's pages and lines), and editorial interventions are shown
on a par with the received text (though marked to let the reader

<footnote n="29"><sup>29</sup> The diplomatic and logical editions shown here are illustrations and are not identical to the diplomatic and logical renditions currently displayable on the DHARMA website.</footnote>
know that intervention has taken place at these points).²⁹ Such alternative presentations, along with any number of others, can be created systematically from all digital editions encoded along the same conventions, and doing so requires only the articulation of a formal set of instructions for generating a rendered document from the marked-up edition. Elena Pierazzo (2016: 29) calls such editions 'paradigmatic' to emphasise that they provide the reader with a choice between alternative tangible expressions.

A further corollary of the facility to hide or show markup at will is that, in principle at least, the descriptive markup can saturate the text to a far greater degree than character-based traditional markup can.<fnref n="30" /> In the latter, too many instances of too many different kinds of brackets and other symbols would make the resulting document unintelligible to any reader, but the computer is not hindered by the extent and complexity of descriptive markup so long as it is rigorously structured. In the traditional Indological bracket system, round parentheses may be used 'for letters which are damaged and partially illegible in the original, or which, being wholly illegible, can be supplied

〈Page 3v〉

(23) pūrvveṇa| sva-sīmā-par¿a?cch¿a?dena _ karaṇjaviraka-taṭe| Atrāsmat-santakā(ḥ)

(24) sarvvāddhyakṣa-n¿a?yoga-n¿a?yuktāḥ Ājñā-sañcāri-kulaputrādhikṛtāḥ bhaṭāḥ

(25) {ṣ}chāttrāś ca viśru○ta-pūrvvayā _ Ājñayā _ Ājñāpayitavyāḥ vidita

(26) m astu ¿t?aḥ yathaiṣo smābhiḥ Ātmano dharmmāyur-bbala-vijayaiśvaryya-v[‖r‖]ivṛdhaye

(27) Ih¿a?mutra-hitārttham āt¿v?ānugrahāya| vaijayike dharma-sthāne| A-bhaṭa-

<caption>Figure 8. Diplomatic edition rendered from the digital edition</caption>

...〈Page 3v〉 (23) pūrvveṇa| sva-sīmā-par〈i〉cch〈e〉dena karaṇjaviraka-taṭe| Atrāsmat-santakā(ḥ) (24) sarvvāddhyakṣa-n〈i〉yoga-n〈i〉yuktāḥ Ājñā-sañcāri-kulaputrādhikṛtāḥ bhaṭāḥ (25) {ṣ}chāttrāś ca viśuta-pūrvvayā Ājñayā Ājñāpayitavyāḥ〈.〉 vidita(26)m astu (v)aḥ yathaiṣo (')smābhiḥ Ātmano dharmmāyur-bbala-vijayaiśvaryya-v[‖r‖]ivṛ〈d〉dhaye (27) Ih〈ā〉mutra-hitārttham āt〈m〉ānugrahāya| vaijayike dharma-sthāne| A-bhaṭa ...

<caption>Figure 9. Logical edition rendered from the digital edition</caption>

<footnote n="30">³⁰ In actual practice, there are some constraints, chiefly stemming from the difficulty of handling situations where segments of text requiring different annotations overlap partially.</footnote>
with certainty' (Fleet 1888: 194). These are two ontologically different
features (although the distinction blurs when vestiges are insufficient to
afford a reading, but do allow ruling out certain restorations). Part of the
reason why classical editions do not distinguish the two may be a desire
to keep the markup simple, but this distinction can and should be
made in a digital edition; once the information is encoded, it is still
possible to hide the distinction from the reader's eyes. Some particulars
of the received text, such as scribal (rather than editorial) correction
in the first syllable of the word *vivrddhaye* in line 26 of our excerpt,
were reported in footnotes by Fleet and Mirashi. Conceptual markup
allows for annotating such a pre-modern correction directly in the
body of the text, and for presenting this annotation to the end user
in various forms: from hiding it altogether,<fnref n="31" /> to indicating it with
brackets,<fnref n="32" /> to describing it in an automatically generated footnote or—
on screen—in a mouseover tooltip.

Indeed, there is no reason to stop at philological annotation.
Conceptual markup can accommodate any kind of annotation
applicable to text segments of any size. Metadata—both of the

<footnote n="31">³¹ One example of hiding encoded information from the reader is the treatment of the punctuation marks in the figures here. In all forms of the rendered text, the punctuation marks of the received text have been represented by vertical bars. The code in Figure 7, however, actually employs an attribute and a controlled vocabulary for classifying the appearance of the original punctuation marks, which in this inscription take the shape of very short vertical bars (classified as ‘comma’ in the encoding) and very short horizontal lines (classified as ‘dash’). Once such details are encoded in a digital edition, they can just as easily be presented with distinct symbols as with a generic punctuation sign. For another example, notice that spaces in the original document (as opposed to editorial spaces between words) are not shown in Fleet and Mirashi’s editions, but they are encoded (along with the binding hole as a special kind of space) in the digital edition. Their location is indicated by symbols in the diplomatic edition of Figure 8 but hidden in the logical edition of Figure 9.</footnote>

<footnote n="32">³² The figures show it as v[rr]i, with the double square brackets indicating the pre-modern deletion of a superfluous consonantal *r* in this *aksara*, which is how I (and Mirashi) interpret the correction that took place here. Fleet, conversely, believes that a vocalic *r* was first engraved here, which was subsequently deleted and the marker for the dependent *i* was added. This is represented in the apparatus of Figure 5 as v[rr]⟨ri⟩, where the double angle brackets signify pre-modern addition.</footnote>
administrative sort and the scholarly sort—may be encoded for the
edition as a whole, while scholarly concepts can be attached to
medium-sized sections such as stanzas of verse, and to smaller
segments such as proper names. The latter are then of course
searchable without false positives (like those resulting from the bold
formatting of names)and, if desired, they may be differentiated, for
instance, into personal and geographical names, the latter into natural
and human geography, and so on. With a sufficiently large corpus of
texts semantically tagged in a standardised manner, it will become
possible to mine the text for such items, contributing to the creation
of prosopographies, gazetteers and any other overviews of concepts
for which tagging has been implemented.

Finally, an extra advantage to descriptive markup over editorial
brackets and symbols is enforced rigour. As most of us know from
experience, it is all too easy to make a mistake and insert the wrong
kind of bracket, forget to close an opened parenthesis, or put an
asterisk in the wrong place. For a computer to be able to interpret the
markup, such mistakes must be avoided: the phenomenon to be
annotated must be identified unambiguously and marked up
accurately. This compels the editor to undertake to some extra labour,
but on the gain side, the computer can also check the correctness of
the encoding and point out where an error has been made.

As will be evident from the above discussion, the opportunities
are tantalising, but the way forward is not easy. Project DHARMA is
making headway in establishing standards for the encoding of Indic
epigraphic texts, but this endeavour cannot be completed all in one
go. Versatility sufficient to cater to a broad base of epigraphic traditions
and research interests must be achieved without the standard becoming
too complex to be manageable. The drive to get ahead with scholarly
research and concentrate on the juicy bits such as semantic tagging
must also be balanced with the necessity of encoding the fundamental
aspects of text structure and philological details. Moreover, tools need
to be developed for creating human-readable outputs (attuned to
various uses and interests) from the digital editions, and for exploiting
the potential of the encoded texts for selective, faceted searching. Most
of this work, unfortunately, takes place in an academic environment where on the one hand funding is available only for a limited and pre-determined period, and on the other hand, there is a pressure on the scholars to deliver traditionally recognised publications. The fast-paced development of technology means that solutions may, in some respects, be dated already by the time they are developed.

The good news is that unlike a printed edition, a digital edition is an ongoing work. Even once it has been 'completed' by one definition of the word, it can continue to be corrected, improved, and enriched with additional details such as semantic tagging and more extensive metadata. Any scholar or team can complete the basic encoding of a larger number of texts while focussing on a smaller core on which they carry out more extensive tagging and research. Merely the largely mechanical transmigration of a pre-existing printed edition into a digital incarnation is a great step toward the accumulation of a critical mass of digital editions that will in turn make it easier to develop further utilities for improving productivity (e.g. by automating the conversion from bracket markup to digital descriptive markup) and open up new vistas for research. Since the TEI is a widely used international standard that has already been applied to a vast number of texts in diverse fields, it has a good chance of being 'future-proof.' Even if a decade or fifty years from now the field of digital humanities evolves into something quite different, there will in all probability be established tools and procedures for backward compatibility, so that texts encoded according to the current standard shall still be usefully processable by computer.

## Acknowledgements

The present publication is a result of the project DHARMA ‘The Domestication of “Hindu” Asceticism and the Religious Making of South and Southeast Asia’. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no 809994). This paper reflects only the author’s view. The funding Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. The author wishes to thank Arlo Griffiths for commenting on an earlier draft of this article.
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