Sharma, Personal and Geographical Names in the Gupta Inscriptions (PGN)
PGN is Tej Ram Sharma's Personal and Geographical Names in the Gupta Inscriptions (1978) —
an onomastic study that registers the personal and place names occurring in Gupta-period
inscriptions, each located by its inscription and line. A specialist epigraphical name-index
paired with a book-length essay on how Indians of the Gupta age actually named themselves.
It is one of the most independent datasets on CDSL: 54.9 % of its headwords occur in no other digitized dictionary here, because royal titulature, dynastic names, and Gupta-era place names simply do not enter literary lexicons.
At a glance
| Code | PGN (source in csl-orig/v02/pgn; no separate repo) |
| Full title | Personal and Geographical Names in the Gupta Inscriptions |
| Author | Tej Ram Sharma |
| Year / size | 1978 · ~378 pages · 485 indexed entries + full essay text |
| Type | Onomastic index (inscriptions) with thematic chapters |
| Source | csl-orig/v02/pgn/ |
| Open | Basic · List · Advanced · Mobile |
| Data | Downloads |
| csl-doc | pgn.rst |
When to use it
Reach for PGN to locate and study a name from the Gupta inscriptions — roughly the
fourth-to-sixth-century records of the Gupta empire and its contemporaries. Three distinct
uses:
- Find every attestation of a person or place: each entry lists inscription number and line for every occurrence.
- Read the name historically: entries carry Sharma's prose discussion — Epic or Purāṇic background, derivation, social setting.
- Browse the naming culture itself: the digitized chapters discuss Vedic, Sūtra, Smṛti, and Nibandha-period naming practice, the name-giving ceremony, secret vs common names, and women's names.
Pair it with the Indian Epigraphical Glossary (IEG) for the technical terms of the same records. For word meanings use Monier-Williams (MW).
Reading an entry
Each entry is a name (<k1>) with the inscriptions and lines in which it appears. The first
entry (csl-orig/v02/pgn/pgn.txt):
<L>1<pc>020<k1>gupta<k2>gupta
1. {%Gupta:%}¦ (No. 1, L. 28; No. 21, L. 4; No. 22, L. 1; No. 47,
L. 1; No. 49, L. 1; No. 50, L. 1; No. 51, L. 2, L. 4; …):
| In the source | Meaning |
|---|---|
{%Gupta:%} | the name (search key <k1>) |
No. 1, L. 28 | an inscription number and line where the name occurs |
| the list | every attestation, by inscription and line |
The No. references resolve against the book's own Code of Inscriptions — a numbered list
of all Gupta records consulted, included in the digitized front matter — not against an
external corpus numbering.
Entries frequently continue into prose. Two real examples (csl-orig/v02/pgn/pgn.txt):
<L>101<pc>057<k1>BIma<k2>BIma
{%Bhima%}¦ (No. 43, LL. 3; 17, 19, 25):
It is a name based on the Epic tradition. Bhima was the name
of one of the five Pa??avas in the Mahabharata and literally
means 'dreadful'.
<L>240<pc>080<k1>undAna<k2>undAna
16. {%Undana%}¦ (No. 5, L. 5):
The root apparent in the form is {%ud - und%} meaning to wet,
bathe from which the name can be derived. The name
{%Undana%} may, therefore, mean 'kind or humane'.
What to notice:
| Convention | Marker / form | Example | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Search key | SLP1 (name) | gupta | k1 = k2 |
| Body form | IAST italic {%…%} | {%Gupta:%} | The printed name |
| Attestation | No. N, L. N | No. 1, L. 28 | Inscription number + line, per the Code of Inscriptions |
| Discussion | free prose under the heading | the Bhīma note | Etymology and Epic/Purāṇic background |
| Footnotes | <sup>N</sup> markers | superscript note numbers | Scholarly apparatus preserved |
More than an index
The digitized file preserves the whole monograph, and its section structure is searchable alongside the entries. After the front matter (Foreword, Preface, Coded Abbreviations, Code of Inscriptions, Transliteration Table), the text runs through three Parts whose chapter headings include the Vedic, Sūtra, Smṛti, and Nibandha periods of naming practice, the name-giving ceremony, "The Secret Name", "The Common Name", "The Abhivadanīya Name", and "The Names of the Girls" — before reaching the indexes proper, including "Names of the Gupta Kings" and thematic lists such as the chief scribes (prathama-kāyasthas). The final run of entries sits under the heading "THE MOUNTAINS" (Revataka, Śumeru, Ūrjayat …), in the geographical section.
For a reader this means a full-text search in the Advanced interface can land inside the essay — useful when you want what Sharma says about, say, matronymics, not just a list of attestations.
See Data Formats for the markup reference.
Search tips
- Names inflect. Try stem forms without case endings first; the index normalizes to a citation form but variant spellings occur between records.
- Personal then geographical. The two categories sit in different parts of the alphabet run — if a place search misses, suspect a person by the same name, and vice versa.
- Kings are grouped. Royal names concentrate in the "Names of the Gupta Kings" section; court officials and scribes in their own lists.
- The printed page is cited. Page-column markers (
<pc>) follow the printed book, so a hit can be checked against the scan.
What makes it distinctive
- Names from the Gupta epigraphic corpus, with full attestations.
- Index + monograph in one dataset — the naming-culture chapters make it readable as a study, not merely consultable as a list.
- Highly independent headword stock — over half its names occur nowhere else on CDSL (54.9 % unique share per the site's atlas measurements, see Guides Hypotheses).
Headword key conventions
<k1> = <k2> = SLP1 (personal or geographical name from the Gupta inscriptions). Entries list the inscriptions and lines where the name is attested.
Abbreviations
No machine-readable abbreviation list yet; the legend lives in the scanned front matter. View front matter →
See also
- Indian Epigraphical Glossary (IEG) — terms from inscriptions
- Monier-Williams (MW) · the full catalog
- csl-doc pgn.rst