AMARA SINHA (c. A.D. 375)  ,

Sanskrit grammarian and poet, of whose personal history hardly anything is known . He is said to have been " one of the nine gems that adorned the throne of Vikramaditya," and according to the evidence of Hsuan Tsang, this is the Chandragupta Vikramaditya that flourished about A.D . 375 . Amara seems to have been a Buddhist; and an early tradition asserts that his works, with one exception, were destroyed during the persecution carried on by the orthodox Brahmins in the 5th century . The exception is the celebrated Amara-Kosha (Treasury of Amara), a vocabulary of Sanskrit roots, in three books, and hence sometimes called Trikanda or the " Tripartite." It contains 10,000 words, and is arranged, like other works of its class, in metre, to aid the memory . The first chapter of the Kosha was printed at Rothe in Tamil character in 1798 . An edition of the entire work, with English notes and an index by H . T . Colebrooke, appeared at Serampore in 18o8 . The Sanskrit text was printed at Calcutta in 1831 . A French translation by A . L .

A . Loiseleur-Deslongchamps as published at

Paris in 1839 .