page_title: Dhanabhuti
section_title: Compared paleography
hierarchical_section_title: Dhanabhuti / Compared paleography
caption_attribution_description: English: Compared paleography of the Dhanabhuti inscriptions in Bharhut and Mathura
context_page_description: Dhanabhūti or Vatsiputra Dhanabhūti was a 2nd or 1st-century BCE Buddhist king in Central India, and the most prominent donor for the Bharhut stupa. He appears in two or three major dedicatory inscriptions at the stupa of Bharhut, and possibly in another inscription at Mathura. Dhanabhuti may have been a feudatory of the Sunga Empire, or a ruler in a neighbouring territory, such as Kosala or Panchala, or possibly a northern king from Sughana in Punjab. He may have also been part of the Mitra dynasty of Kosambi.
context_section_description: The paleography of the Dhanabhuti inscriptions, when inscriptions from Bharhut and Mathura are compared, raises a few issues. The Brahmi script used in Bharhut is of a rounded type rather similar to the shapes of the script used at the time of Ashoka. The Brahmi script used in the Mathura inscription is more angular and typical of the Northern Satraps period in the 1st century CE. In particular, the script of the Mathura inscription is considered as virtually identical with the script used by the Northern Satrap Sodasa in Mathura circa 15 CE. According to Cunningham, because of these paleographical differences, the Dhanabhuti of Bharhut and the Dhanabhuti of Mathura were at least separated by 50 years, and the latter may have been the grandson of the former. This remains a stumbling block in securely identifying the Dhanabhutis of Mathura and Bharhut as the same person.
  According to several authors, the difference is attributable not to a distance in time, but to the geographical distance and the possibly more conservative context of Bharhut, which would have preserved older forms of writing, while Mathura may have adopted new forms earlier. Although the writing style remains traditional, some of the shapes of the Bharhut torana inscription have some modern features, such as the shapes of the letters va, ha, pa, ra, and the long flourish of the i, which suggest a closer temporal proximity with the Mathura inscription.
  For Sonya Rhie Quintanilla, this implies that Dhanabhuti belonged to the period circa 150 BCE, when he probably made both dedicatory inscriptions in Bharhut and Mathura. She considers that the Brahmi script in Mathura was thus virtually identical between circa 150 BCE, her dating for the Mathura Dhanabhuti inscription, and circa 15 CE, the widely acknowledged dating for the Sodasa inscriptions. On the contrary, historian Ajit Kumar, by equalling the timing of both inscriptions of Dhanabhuti with the inscriptions of Sodasa, claims that Dhanabuthi lived in the 1st century CE, and that the monuments of Bharhut or Sanchi are also from this rather late period, long after the Sungas had declined.
caption: Compared paleography of the Dhanabhuti inscriptions in Bharhut and Mathura. The Brahmi letters in Bharhut (left) are close to those of Ashoka, while the Brahmi letters in Mathura (right) are similar to those of Sodasa circa 15 CE.[24][25]
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