Eran Boar Inscription

Eran, Sagar district, Madhya Pradesh · regnal year 1 of Toramana, c. 500 CE · Sanskrit

The Eran Boar is a colossal stone sculpture of Vishnu’s third (boar) avatar, consecrated by the minister Dhanyavishnu in the first regnal year of Toramana, c. 500 CE. The boar stands at human-plus scale and its body is incised with hundreds of miniature relief figures of sages, gods, and devotees clinging to its flanks — a visual encyclopaedia of late Gupta-period iconography reframed under a Hunnic king.

The inscription

The Sanskrit inscription on the boar’s base names Maharajadhiraja Toramana as the reigning sovereign and Dhanyavishnu (brother of the Gupta-era minister Matrivishnu) as the donor. The inscription is the earliest secure dating peg for Toramana’s reign in central India.

Why a Hunnic king consecrates a Vishnu Varaha

The Eran Boar is the most explicit visual statement that the Alkhan ruling family read its own boar-name — Pahlavi warāz, Old Persian varaz — into Vishnu’s third avatar. The Mazdean boar of Verethragna, the Pecheneg Thonuzoba, the Bamiyan boar and the Eran boar may be read as branches of one widely-shared boar-as-royal-animal motif — a resonance of a common idea across the steppe and Iran, not proof that the peoples who used it were kin. (On the House of Waraz see the Peroz I note: that old Iranian house predates the Hephthalites and cannot simply be equated with a boar-clan.) See the Origins and Migration West pages.

Sources

• Eran Boar Inscription, regnal year 1 of Toramana
• Bhandarkar, Epigraphia Indica, Vol. XIX–XXIII (1929)
• Bakker, The Alkhan (2020)
• Sircar, “Eran Boar Inscription” notes

Last edited 18 October 2026.