Sircar, Indian Epigraphical Glossary (IEG)
IEG is D. C. Sircar's Indian Epigraphical Glossary (1966) — a specialist glossary of the
technical terms (administrative, fiscal, legal, social) that occur in Indian inscriptions,
each defined and tied to the epigraphical corpus it comes from. Glosses are in English.
It is one of the most independent datasets on CDSL: measured against the rest of the corpus, 57.5 % of its headwords appear in no other digitized dictionary here (second highest of all 44), which is exactly what you would expect of a work that indexes a document genre — stone and copper-plate records — that literary lexicons barely touch.
At a glance
| Code | IEG (source in csl-orig/v02/ieg; no separate repo) |
| Full title | Indian Epigraphical Glossary |
| Author | D. C. Sircar |
| Year / size | 1966 · ~580 pages · ~7,900 entries |
| Type | Glossary of epigraphical terms (Sanskrit/Prakrit → English) |
| Source | csl-orig/v02/ieg/ |
| Open | Basic · List · Advanced · Mobile |
| Data | Downloads |
| csl-doc | ieg.rst |
When to use it
Reach for IEG when reading inscriptions — or modern editions of them — and you meet an
administrative, fiscal, legal, or institutional term that a literary dictionary will not gloss
in its technical sense. Typical wins:
- Revenue and land terms — classes of land tenure, tax names, measures.
- Administrative titles — offices of the court, provincial and local administration, military ranks.
- Religious-institutional vocabulary — temple offices, endowment formulas, monastic terms as inscriptions actually use them.
For general meanings use Monier-Williams (MW); for names (persons and places) from the same inscriptional world use PGN.
Reading an entry
Each entry is a term (<k1>) with the inscription corpus it occurs in and an English gloss.
The first entry (csl-orig/v02/ieg/ieg.txt):
<L>1<pc>001<k1>AbADa<k2>AbADa
{%ābādha%}¦ (CII 1), illness.
| In the source | Meaning |
|---|---|
{%ābādha%} | the term (search key <k1> is SLP1) |
(CII 1) | the source — Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, vol. 1 |
illness | the English gloss |
Many entries have numbered senses, each with its own citation trail, because the same term
behaves differently in different record types. Real example (csl-orig/v02/ieg/ieg.txt, entry
57), lightly wrapped for readability:
<L>57<pc>004<k1>AcArya<k2>AcArya
{%Acarya%}¦ (<ls>EI</ls> 33; <ls>BL</ls>), title of a religious teacher;
used commonly by the Buddhists and Jains (<ls>LL</ls>; <ls>SII</ls> 1).
<P>¦ (<ls>CII</ls> 3; <ls>EI</ls> 32; <ls>ML</ls>), a spiritual guide or teacher; a preceptor.
<P>¦ Same as {%Sthan-acarya%} (<ls>EI</ls> 17), a temple priest.
<P>¦ (<ls>EI</ls> 8; <ls>IA</ls> 14), an architect; used in the sense of 'a master',
i. e. 'a master-mason'; cf. {%Acari%} …
What to notice:
| Convention | Marker / form | Example | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Search key | SLP1 (technical term) | AbADa | k1 = k2 |
| Body form | IAST italic {%…%} | {%ābādha%} | The printed form |
| Corpus source | (CII N) etc. | (CII 1) = Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, vol. 1 | Where the term appears in the epigraphic record |
| Full citation | <ls> + volume/page | <ls>Ep. Ind.</ls>, Vol. IX, p. 151 | Longer form used inside prose notes |
| New sense | <P>¦ at line start | sense 2, 3, 4… | Each sense carries its own sources |
| Cross-reference | cf. / See | see {%abhaya-mudra%} | Points to the head entry for compounds |
The glosses are terse but precise about register: under {%abhaya%}, sense 1 is the
hand-pose ({%mudra%}) on images, cited from Epigraphia Indica vol. 24, while sense 2 is
"place of security to persons in distress" — with a Tamil equivalent noted — keyed to siglum
SITI in Sircar's own source list. That bilingual aside is typical: South-Indian
inscriptional practice often surfaces Tamil forms.
See Data Formats for the markup reference.
Where the citations point
Sircar keys almost every sense to a named inscription series. The sigla you will meet most are
the multi-volume national corpora and epigraphy journals — CII (Corpus Inscriptionum
Indicarum), EI (Epigraphia Indica), IA (Indian Antiquary), SII (South-Indian
Inscriptions) — alongside journal sigla such as IHQ. IEG's printed key to these
abbreviations survives as scanned front matter (linked from
csl-doc);
its legend is not yet transcribed machine-readably on this site — see
Abbreviations compared for where IEG stands. With roughly
11,400 <ls> citation tags across the file, a sense without a source pointer is the
exception, not the rule.
Search tips
- Think compounds. The headwords are technical compounds (
{%abhaya-mudra%},{%daṇḍādhipa%}); if the compound misses, try the members. - Try both spellings. Sanskritized Prakrit and vernacular forms sit beside classical
ones (
{%acara%}next to{%ācāra%}). - Read every sense. An inscription term frequently has a mundane meaning in one corpus
and an office-title meaning in another; the
<P>paragraphs keep them separate. - Follow the
cf.links. Synonym chains ({%Daṇḍādhipa%}→{%Daṇḍapāla%},{%Daṇḍādhipati%}) map the terminology of one administrative sphere.
What makes it distinctive
- Built for inscriptions. Administrative/technical senses, keyed to the epigraphical corpus.
- The standard reference for epigraphical terminology (Sircar was the leading epigraphist of his generation and the general editor of Epigraphia Indica).
- Highly independent headword stock — the majority of its terms occur nowhere else on CDSL (57.5 % unique share per the site's atlas measurements, see Guides Hypotheses).
Headword key conventions
<k1> = <k2> = SLP1 (epigraphical technical term). Glosses are terse English definitions with a corpus source in parentheses.
Abbreviations
No machine-readable abbreviation list yet; the legend lives in the scanned front matter. View front matter →
See also
- Personal & Geographical Names in the Gupta Inscriptions (PGN) — names from inscriptions
- Monier-Williams (MW) · the full catalog
- csl-doc ieg.rst