English: Discovered by British archaeologist T. Bloch and others in what is now north Chhattisgarh, this is an inscription in the Jogimara cave. It is in Brahmi script, Magadhi language. The upper version is a paper ink impression and was published in 1906, then republished in 1914. The lower version is a photograph of exactly the same inscription.

This is a notable and controversial inscription. Scholars agree that this inscription is from about the 2nd-century BCE (estimates range between 3rd and 1st century BCE) because it uses Brahmi, and Magadhi is older than Pali language of Buddhist canons. The inscription is non-religious and non-political, unrelated to any king or dynasty. It is about a girl and a boy, and their pursuit of arts.

The controversy comes from a few eroded parts. Depending on how one interpolates and interprets, the translation comes out to either (1) a love-graffiti, where the girl and the boy declare in ancient writing that they are lovers, or (2) an art-note, where a boy who is a sculpture-painter helps a girl who is a dancer to carve and create a cave theatre and another cave for other girls to use as a dressing room.

The upper portion is a photograph of the 2-D print of this inscription published in the Annual Report of the Archaeological Survey of India 1903–1904. Since this 2-D image was published in an early 20th-century by T. Bloch, the PD-Art guidelines of wikimedia commons apply. Any rights I have, I herewith donate it to the public domain (CC0) through wikimedia commons.