PREFACE.
DURING the past field season, my work laid for the most part in Eastern Rajputana, and included some of the southern districts of the Panjab.
Leaving Simla on the 1st of October 1883, I examined the ancient forts at Bhatinda, Sirsar and Hansi, together with the mosques and monolith of Firuz Shah Tughlak at Fattehabad. The next place of importance on this route is Tusham, celebrated for its rock-cut Gupta inscriptions, of which I secured photographs. A quantity of inscribed data was also collected at the old sites of Hansi, Bairat, &c.; it is to be regretted that the Asoka inscription at the latter place is almost entirely effaced, and does not lend itself to reproduction by mechanical means; I conclude, however, that it is merely a transcript of Asoka’s edicts, of which so many copies are found incised on rocks and boulders in Northern India.
From Bairit my route passed through Amba and Jaipur (the old and new cities of the Kachhwahas) to Ajmir, after a short halt at which place I marched across the Indian desert to Nagor or Nagapuri, an ancient site in the Marwar State, hitherto unexplored; and which contains, amongst other interesting objects, some fine temples. In this neighbourhood I came in contact with the desert tribe of Saharias, who are said to be of Arabian extraction, and take their tribal name from the Desert of Sahira ; of this tribe, and likewise of the Sondhias, I prepared an ethnographical account in a separate paper.
