earlier than the 2nd-century BCE, or later than 1st-century BCE. In 1920, Jayaswal and Banerji stated that this inscription cannot be placed before the 2nd-century, and may be a bit later. On palaeographic grounds and considering it with information in other ancient Indian inscriptions, Sircar places this in the second half of the 1st-century BCE, or possibly in the first decades of the 1st-century CE. Inscription The seventeen lines of the inscription has been variously translated by many. The translation published by Jayaswal and Banerji in Epigraphia Indica Volume 20 (public domain), with alternate readings by other scholars, is as follows: Significance The Hathigumpha Inscription is the main source of information about the Jain Kalinga ruler Kharavela. His year-by-year achievements in this inscription, states Richard Salomon, "approximates the character of a pure panegyric". This is an early prototype of prashasti style of inscriptions. The disagreements between scholars is in reading with interpolations, interpreting, dating and then linking the names of places and people mentioned with other records and general chronology of ancient events assuming a particular reading is correct. Notable mentions in the Hathigumpha Inscription include: major public infrastructure projects in ancient India (these lines can be clearly read) charitable donations to monks, public, Brahmins festivals and arts a war against the Satavahana king Satakarni. This mention has been a key contributor to the mis-dating of many Buddhist monuments in the central India, states Walter Spink. First the Hathigumpha inscription was dated between the 3rd and 2nd-century BCE, then Satakarni was treated as a contemporary of Kharavela based on this reading. This error compounded, leading to the widely repeated belief in modern Indian literature that the earliest Andhra dynasties started in late 3rd to early 2nd-century BCE, that these ancient Andhra rulers and others built the Chaitya halls at Bhaja, Nasik, Kondane and some Krishna river valley sites between 300 BCE and 100 BCE. This error has multiplied, says Spink, whereby many other inscriptions, coins, texts mentioning the names of Andhra kings, along with monuments have been dated to far more ancient period, than what later discoveries and scholarship has found. This error has also affected the chronology of art development in Indian history. Many of these monuments and dates should be shifted forward by 200 to 300 years, to 1st-century CE and early 2nd-century CE. a Nanda king building a water canal, which was then extended by Kharavela to