Galle (Sri Lanka). Stele of Zheng He (鄭和), detail of Persian portion. (Zenodo).
The inscription is engraved on a stone slab discovered in 1911 by H. F. Tomalin, the Provincial Engineer at Galle, in a culvert near the turn to Cripps Road within that town and afterwards moved to the Colombo Museum. The slab features inscriptions in three different languages, enclosed within a floral border: Tamil (top-left, IN03150), Persian (bottom-left) and Chinese (right, IN03152). The Persian inscription is dealt with here.
Following the discovery of the slab, the Chinese inscription was successfully transcribed and translated by Edmund Backhouse. However, Rao Bahadur H. Krishna Sastri (Assistant Superintendent for Epigraphy, Madras) and J. Horrovitz (Epigraphist for Moslem Inscriptions in India) failed in their efforts to decipher the Tamil and Persian texts respectively. Sometime later, the Tamil inscription was transcribed and translated for the third volume of Epigraphia Zeylanica (1933: 331–341) by Senarath Paranavitana, who benefitted from having access to Backhouse’s translation of the Chinese text. The Persian inscription is badly damaged but Khwaja Muhammad Ahmad of the Archaeological Department of H. E. H. the Nizam’s Dominions was able to compile a text and translation of the legible portion, which was published in 1933 as an appendix (Appendix B) to Paranavitana’s account of the Tamil inscription.
Following the discovery of the slab, the Chinese inscription was transcribed and translated by Edmund Backhouse. Like the Tamil inscription, it is dated in the second month of the seventh year of Yongle (永樂), the Chinese emperor whose reign began in 1403. The text features praise and offerings dedicated by the Chinese emperor, through his envoys Ching-Ho and Wang Ch’ing Lien, to the Buddha. The other two inscriptions on the slab feature similar lists of offerings but the beneficiary is different in each case, being a Hindu cult deity in the Tamil text and an Islamic saint or shrine in the Persian. It therefore appears that, when the Chinese arrived in Sri Lanka, they made gifts of equal value to several different religious traditions of the region and registered these gifts on the same stele.
| Metadata | |
|---|---|
| Inscription ID | IN03151 |
| Title | Galle Trilingual Stele - Persian Inscription |
| Alternative titles | |
| Parent Object | OB03125 |
| Related Inscriptions | IN03150 IN03152 |
| Responsibility | |
| Author | Senarath Paranavitana |
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| Digitally edited by | |
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| Authority for | |
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| Language | فارسی |
| Reigning monarch | |
| Commissioner | Yuṅlo (Yung Lo) |
| Topic | features blessings of the light of Islam and lists a number of offerings to an Islamic saint or shrine |
| Date: | |
| Min | 1410 |
| Max | 1411 |
| Comment | Due to the damaged condition of the inscription, the portion of the text containing the date is no longer legible. However, the Chinese and Tamil inscriptions on the same slab are both dated in the second month of the seventh year of Yuṅlo (Yung Lo), the Chinese emperor whose reign began in 1403 A.D. It may therefore be assumed that the date of the Persian inscription was the same or similar. |
| Hand | |
| Letter size | |
| Description | Letter size not recorded. |
| Layout | |
| Campus: | |
| Width | 40.64 |
| Height | 48.26 |
| Description | 22 lines engraved on the bottom-left portion of a stone slab. In addition to the Persian record, the same slab also features inscriptions in two other languages: Tamil, in the top-left portion of the slab, and Chinese, in the right-hand portion of the slab. The total area covered by all three inscriptions measures 3 foot 8 inches (111.76 cm) by 2 foot 3 inches (68.58 cm). |
| Decoration | A floral border surrounded the area covered by the three inscriptions. On either face of the top portion of the slab, of which the town corners are rounded, there is a carving of two dragons facing each other. |
| Bibliography | |
| References | In 1913, Edward W. Perera contributed a paper on the trilingual slab to the Spolia Zeylanica (vol. viii, pp. 122ff.), which included an account of its discovery and its historical importance, together with the text and translation of the Chinese inscription and the results of some unsuccessful attempts to decipher the Tamil and Persian records. Khwaja Muhammad Ahmad’s text and translation of the legible portion of the Persian inscription were later published as an appendix to Senarath Paranavitana’s account of the Tamil inscription in Epigraphia Zeylanica 3 (1928–33): 331–341, no. 36, Appendix B. |
| Add to bibliography | |
| Misc notes | |