A digital archive of the stone inscriptions of Bengaluru and the country around it, made by The Mythic Society.

For more than two thousand years, people here recorded what mattered to them by cutting it into stone — a grant of land, a temple's founding, a death in battle, the name of someone who paid for a tank to be dug. Many of those stones are still standing in fields, beside temples, and at roadsides. Many are worn, broken, or slowly becoming unreadable.

This archive holds what our team has read from them.

What is in it

Inscriptions. Each stone we have documented has its own page: a photograph, the reading in Kannada, and what is known about it — where it stands, when it was cut, and what it says.

Characters. Every letter of every reading is cut out as a separate picture and filed by the letter it represents. So you can see one letter — say ಕ — as it was actually carved, across many stones and many centuries, and watch its shape change over time. This is the part of the archive that does not exist anywhere else.

Words and sentences, for people learning to read the old Kannada script.

Who it is for

Epigraphists and historians, students of Kannada, and anyone curious about what is written on the stones they pass. You do not need to be a specialist. If you can read Kannada, a good deal of this will open up to you; if you cannot, the photographs and the descriptions still tell a story.

How to see it

The archive is free. You need to sign in, which takes a moment and asks for your name and what brings you here. We ask because we would like to know who is using this work — not to sell anything and not to share your details.

We do this because the stones are disappearing. Some of the ones in this archive are already harder to read than when they were photographed, and a few are gone. What is written down survives.

Free to use. Sign in with Google or an email link.