Inscription (INBG00019) on an image of the Buddha from Bodhgaya
Bodhgayā, Bihār. Inscription on an image of a seated Buddha. Cunningham archive, British Museum (detail).
Bodhgayā image of the Buddha with an inscription on the pedestal
Bodhgayā, Bihār. Seated Buddha with an inscription (INBG00019) on the pedestal. Indian Museum, Kolkata
Seated Buddha from Icchāwar with an inscription of Harirāja
Icchāwar (Uttar Pradesh). Satellite view (Wikimapia).
Yamunā river looking west near Icchāwar, Uttar Pradesh.
OBPYU16 Socle of Kan Wet Khaung Mound Stone Buddha Image
Sri Ksetra, Myanmar. Yahanda gate and Baw Baw Gyi stūpa (Wikimapia).
Seated Buddha from the Kan Wet Gaung Gon, near the southern side of the Baw Baw Gyi stūpa. Sriksetra Museum 2013/1/48.
PYU16 Socle of Kan Wet Khaung Mound Stone Buddha Image Inscription
Front of the Pedestal of the Seated Buddha from the Kan Wet Gaung Gon, near the southern side of the Baw Baw Gyi stūpa.
PYU16 Socle of Kan Wet Khaung Mound Stone Buddha Image Inscription.
Inscription (IN11006) on a conical stamp (OB11006) with a seated Buddha and stūpas.
Inscription (IN11006) on a conical stamp (OB11006) with a seated Buddha and stūpas.
North India (find-spot unknown). Concial stamp, inscribed face (note: image reversed). British Museum 1957,0515.1.
IN03152 Galle Trilingual Stele – Chinese Inscription
Galle (Sri Lanka). Stele of Zheng He (鄭和), transcription of Chinese 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, IN03151) and Chinese (right). The Chinese inscription is dealt with here.
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.
