J. F. Campbell Collection > Memorandum on clay discs called "Spindle Whorls" and Votive Seals found at Sankisa, Behar, and other Buddhist ruins in the North Western provinces of India

135
law given in that work. And it is almost unnecessary to point out the
resemblance which the highly ornamented Disc No. 7 bears to this sketch.
The other discs, though not so elaborately ornamented, seem to adopt
the same idea. No. 11, as far as ornamentation is concerned, undoubtedly
resembles a wheel, though, as the section will show, it can never have been
used, as some of my friends have suggested, as the wheel of a toy cart ;
nor indeed are there any marks of wear on any of the wheel-shaped discs
to support the view that they were used for miniature playthings of this
description. It seems much more probable that they were votive offer-
ings intended to represent, more or less the Buddhist wheel of the law,
similar to that stamped on some of the coins recently submitted by me to
the Society,
The view that these were indeed votive offerings, and not toy cart
wheels or pachisi or draughtsmen, as some have suggested, is further borne
out by the large numbers of clay discs, of a somewhat similar type, but
bearing on them the well known Buddhist formula, found in the same
neighbourhood. These seals, as they have sometimes been called, from their
bearing a seal-like impi'ess, have been figured by Moor in his Hindu Pan-
theon and have been described by General Cunningham, by Dr. Rajen-
dralala Mitra, C. I. E. and others. General Cunningham, if I remember
right, found large quantities of such " seals" made of lac in the Buddhist
ruins of Behar. Though my stay at Sankisa was short, I succeeded in ob-
taining a considerable number of these seals. Many of them are from the
same stamp. Others from different moulds bear the same well known for-
mula commencing "ye dharma hetavo^ The character of the legend in all
these cases is comparatively modern. Those, however, marked 1 and 2
Plate XV bear the formula in the Gupta character. Others again marked
3 to 6 are deserving of notice from the variety of their ornamentation.
They would seem all to have been made and stamped, in what I may call, a
cushion-like fashion, after the manner of the quaintly-shaped Mitra coins
recently submitted by me to the Society, Some of these seals are I think
worthy of being figured in the Society's Journal,
There can be little doubt that these so-called seals, bearing the Buddhist
formula, are votive offerings. A friend of mine, Mrs, Murray- Aynsley who
recently travelled through a portion of Ladakh, brought me thence two
stones, one inscribed with a portion of the Buddhist Formula, Plate XV,
No. 7, the other bearing a conventional ornamentation. That these stones
are offered in the present day, will be seen from the following extract from
Mrs. Murray-Aynsley's work entitled " Our Visit to Hindostan, Kashmir
and Ladakh," p. 88,
" We there first saw some of the walls called Manes, which are form-
ed of stones placed one upon the other without any mortar, and are
9