Pallava Stone, Gupta Pillars, Pampa's Verse
12 October 2026 · Nabu news
The Indian epigraphic record arrived in force. The DHARMA project’s Tamil-country estate — eleven corpora from the Pallava charters to the Chola temple walls, the Pāṇḍya country, and the South Indian Inscriptions selections — enters as 1,267 editions read at the line grain, the inscriptions’ own romanized Tamil with the engraver’s line breaks kept. Beside it the Deccan estate: twenty corpora from Early Āndhradeśa and Kanaganahalli’s Prakrit donor records through the Telugu and Kalyāṇa Cālukya stones to the Maitraka and Bengal copper plates — 1,694 editions more, every in-file license recorded verbatim and every licence-less file carrying its repository’s grant honestly. A metadata sidecar of 734 rows brings the estates’ dating and findspot scholarship along as data.
The Siddham archive joined from its Zenodo deposit: 427 Gupta, Vākāṭaka and Kadamba inscriptions, and with them the library’s first shared era table — Śaka, Vikrama, Kollam and Gupta-Valabhī offsets drawn from Sewell and Dikshit’s 1896 tables — so that a donation dated “GE 98” now carries its real envelope of 417–418 CE.
Literature came with the stones. Andrew Ollett’s editions bring the first Kannada literary texts the library has ever held — sixteen classics from Pampa’s Ādipurāṇa of 941 through Ranna, Nāgavarma II and Janna to Kanakadāsa, their meters annotated — and twenty-two licensed Prakrit works: Hāla’s Sattasaī, the Gaüḍavaho, Vimala’s Paumacariya, the Deśīnāmamālā, and two Śvētāmbara canonical texts whose Ardhamāgadhī is the first individual Prakrit the library names as its own language. Nine canonical files whose editions carry no grant stay out, excluded by a parse-time license gate rather than by silence.
The registry grew to carry all of it: Telugu and Kannada anchors under their Dravidian families, Old and Middle Kannada stages from the Halmidi inscription’s fifth century to the dāsa poets, Tamil re-seated on the South Dravidian branch, and Ardhamāgadhī minted under the Prakrit collective — four language shelves lit at once, every claim resolving on a registry node and zero pending postures left on the board.
As always: canonical means canonical — every text verbatim from its source, every exclusion a written rule, every license the grantor’s own words.