Truman Michelson was an anthropologist working for the Bureau of American Ethnology and the Smithsonian institute who helped pioneer the classification and preservation of Algonquian languages. This paper was written shortly before he turned from Indo-European to American language and concerns the language of the Edicts of Ashoka, a king of India whose laws have been found in India, Nepal, India, and Afghanistan. This important document of Indian law of the 300s BC shows several variations among copies, and it these are the variations for which Michelson accounts by linguistic analysis. An interesting read for those who study Sanskrit literature, and particularly Sanskrit linguistics.