IN03144 Poḷonnaruva Vaṭa-dā-gē Pillar Inscription of Sena I

The inscription is engraved on one side of a pillar found at the Vaṭa-dā-gē at Poḷonnaruva, where it had been installed in the pavement. It was recorded as No. 55 in the list of inscriptions examined between 1901 and 1905 in the Annual Report of the Archaeological Survey of Ceylon for 1905 (p. 40). The pillar was subsequently removed to the Archaeological Museum at Anurādhapura. A portion of the inscription was obliterated at some point in the past, possibly when the pillar was used as a paving slab. Twelve lines remain legible, from which it seems that the inscription was a grant of immunities to a village named Muhundehi-gama. Fortunately, the surviving lines also include the date of the inscription, which is given as the fifteenth year of a king styled Abhā Salamevan. Bell, however, misread this date as the forty-fifth year of Abhā Salamevan. This caused some puzzlement because, although the inscription may be dated to the nine century A.D. on palaeographic grounds, no king is recorded in the historical chronicles of Sri Lanka as having reigned for more than forty years at any time between the fourth and eleventh centuries A.D. As a consequence, this inscription was sometimes cited as evidence that the chronicles do not provide a reliable source for the lengths of royal reigns in medieval Sri Lanka, until Senarath Paranavitana corrected Bell’s mistake in the third volume of Epigraphia Zeylanica (p. 290).  Paranavitana also concluded that the king mentioned in the inscription was probably Sena I, who is known to have used the viruda title Abhā Salamevan.