In 1831, the East India Company officer William Elliott made a facsimile of the inscription. Based on this facsimile, in 1834, James Prinsep published a lithograph in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. However, this lithograph did not represent every single word of the inscription correctly. Some years later, British engineer T. S. Burt made an ink impression of the inscription. Based on this, in 1838, Prinsep published an improved lithograph in the same journal, with his reading of the script and translation of the text.
Decades later, Bhagwan Lal Indraji made another copy of the inscription on a cloth. Based on this copy, Bhau Daji Lad published a revised text and translation in 1875, in Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. This reading was the first one to correctly mention the kings name as Chandra. In 1888, John Faithfull Fleet published a critical edition of the text in Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum'.
In 1945, Govardhan Rai Sharma dated the inscription to the first half of the 5th century CE, on paleographic grounds. He observed that its script was similar to the writing on other Gupta-Era inscriptions, including the ones discovered at Bilsad (415 CE), Baigram (449 CE), and Kahanum (449 CE). R. Balasubramaniam (2005) noted that the characters of the Delhi inscription closely resembled the dated inscriptions of Chandragupta II, found at Udayagiri in Madhya Pradesh.