Brahmi script
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 12/22/21
Brāhmī
Brahmi script on Ashoka Pillar in Sarnath (circa 250 BCE)
Script type: Abugida
Time period: At least by the 3rd century BCE[1] to 5th century CE
Direction: left-to-right
Languages: Sanskrit language, Pali, Prakrit, Kannada, Tamil, Saka, Tocharian
Related scripts
Parent systems : Proto-Sinaitic script?; Phoenician alphabet?; Aramaic alphabet?; Brahmi
Child systems: Numerous descendant writing systems
Sister systems: Kharoṣṭhī
ISO 15924
ISO 15924: Brah, 300, Brahmi
Unicode
Unicode alias: Brahmi
Unicode range: U+11000–U+1107F
The theorised Semitic origins of the Brahmi script are not universally agreed upon.[2]
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.
Brahmi (/ˈbrɑːmi/; [x]; ISO: Brāhmī) is a writing system of ancient South Asia.[3] The Brahmi writing system, or script, appeared as a fully developed universal one in South Asia in the third century BCE,[4] and is a forerunner of all writing systems that have found use in South Asia with the exception of the Indus script of the third millennium BCE, the Kharosthi script, which originated in what today is northwestern Pakistan in the fourth or possibly fifth century BCE,[5] the Perso–Arabic scripts since the medieval period, and the Latin scripts of the modern period.[4] Its descendants, the Brahmic scripts, continue to be in use today not only in South Asia, but also Southeast Asia.[6][7][8]
Brahmi is an abugida which uses a system of diacritical marks to associate vowels with consonant symbols. The writing system only went through relatively minor evolutionary changes from the Mauryan period (3rd century BCE) down to the early Gupta period (4th century CE), and it is thought that as late as the 4th century CE, a literate person could still read and understand Mauryan inscriptions.[9] Sometime thereafter, the capability to read the original Brahmi script was lost. The earliest (indisputably dated) and best-known Brahmi inscriptions are the rock-cut edicts of Ashoka in north-central India, dating to 250–232 BCE.
As for the minor monuments henceforth referred to as the "Buddhist Inscriptions", including the Minor Rock Edicts and Minor Pillar Edicts, a casual inspection of the inscriptional evidence and the scholarship on them might indicate that they were inscribed by Chandragupta's grandson Asoka, since the author of the First Minor Rock Edict is explicitly named "Devanampriya Asoka" in two copies of the text.
Unfortunately, we do not have rich, reliable historical sources for the Mauryas. We have only extremely tenuous information about them -- most of it about "Asoka" -- from very late Buddhist "histories", which are in large part fantasy-filled hagiographies having nothing to do with actual human events in the real world. Moreover, as Max Deeg has argued, not only did the inscriptions remain in public view for centuries, but their script and language remained legible to any literate person through the Kushan period (at least to ca. AD 250). This strongly suggests that the inscriptions influenced the legendary "histories" of Buddhism that began to develop at about that time....
[The name Devanampriya Asoka occurs only in the late Buddhist Inscriptions known as the Minor Rock Edicts, specifically the Maski Inscription and the recently discovered Nittur Inscription. According to Sircar (1975), the Gujarra Inscription should be included with them, but it is extremely problematic, and seems to be a crude forgery, as discussed below. The rubbing of the Maski Inscription provided by Hultzsch (1925: 174) is very poor. Hultzsch reads Asok[a]sa 'of Asoka' without comment or explanation of the bracketed "[a]", but in the rubbing the part that includes his Asok[a] is actually written very clearly [[x] [d]eva-na[m]piyasa Asokesa, with the name in an eastern dialect form.]...
But in any case, the positive identification of Asoka as the author of the Maski and Nittur "Minor Rock Edict" inscriptions, which are radically different from any of the highly distinctive Major Inscriptions, makes it absolutely certain that "Devanampriya Asoka" cannot after all be the author of the Major Inscriptions, which explicitly and repeatedly say they are by Devanampriya Priyadarsi 'His Majesty Priyadarsi'. Considering the fact that we have absolutely no reliable historical information on "Asoka", and the fact noted by Deeg that the Major Inscriptions stood in open view for centuries after their erection and must have influenced the later writers of the Buddhist "histories" in question, it is most likely that "Asoka" was not in fact a Mauryan ruler. We do not really know when or where he ruled, if he existed at all; we do not actually know that Dasaratha was the grandson of a Mauryan ruler named Asoka; and so on....
Who, then, really was Devanampriya Asoka? The evidence suggests at least two possibilities. One is that he was imagined by the Kushan period Normative Buddhists on the basis of their understanding of the monumental Major Inscriptions erected by the Mauryas -- evidently by Amitrochates ~ Bindusara. "Asoka" was then projected back to the glorious Mauryan period as an ideal for good Kushan rulers to follow... At any rate, the inscriptions of this Devanampriya Asoka, the apparent author of some of the Late Inscriptions, simply do not have anything in common with the Major Inscriptions of the Mauryas decreed by Devanampriya Priyadarsi....
According to the traditional analysis, the single most important putative "Asoka" inscription for the history of Buddhism is the unique "Third Minor Rock Edict" found at Bairat, now known as the Calcutta-Bairat Inscription, in which "the king of Magadha, Piyadasa" addresses the "Samgha" (community of Buddhist monks) directly, and gives the names of a number of Buddhist sutras, saying, "I desire, Sirs, that many groups of monks and (many) nuns may repeatedly listen to these expositions of the Dharma, and may reflect (on them)." The problems with the inscription are many. It begins with the otherwise unattested phrase "The Magadha King Piyadasa", not Devanampriya Priyadarsi (or a Prakrit version of that name). The omission of the title Devanampriya is nothing short of shocking. Moreover, it is the only inscription to even mention Magadha. It is also undated, unlike the genuine Major Inscriptions, all of which are dated. In the text, the authorial voice declares "reverence and faith in the Buddha, the Dharma, (and) the Samgha".
This is the only occasion in all of the Mauryan inscriptions where the Triratna 'Three Jewels', the "refuge" formula well known from later devotional Buddhism, is mentioned. Most astonishingly, throughout the text the author repeatedly addresses the Buddhist monks humbly as bhamte, translated by Hultzsch as "reverend sirs". The text also contains a higher percentage of words that are found solely within it (i.e., not also found in some other inscription) than does any other inscription. From beginning to end, the Calcutta-Bairat Inscription is simply incompatible with the undoubtedly genuine Major Inscriptions. It is also evidently incompatible with the other Buddhist inscriptions possibly attributable to a later ruler named Devanampriya Asoka.
However, because the inscription is also the only putative Asokan inscription that mentions Buddhist texts, and even names seven of them explicitly, scholars are loath to remove it from the corpus....
The Vinaya per se cannot be dated back to the time of the Buddha (as the text intends), nor to the time of Asoka; it cannot be dated even to the Saka-Kushan period. All fully attested Vinaya texts are actually dated, either explicitly or implicitly, to the Gupta period, specifically to the fifth century AD: "In most cases, we can place the vinayas we have securely in time: the Sarvastivada-vinaya that we know was translated into Chinese at the beginning of the fifth century (404-405 C.E.). So were the Vinayas of the Dharmaguptakas (408), the Mahisasakas (423-424), and the Mahasamghikas (416). The Mulasarvastivada-vinaya was translated into both Chinese and Tibetan still later, and the actual contents of the Pali Vinaya are only knowable from Buddhaghosa's fifth century commentaries."
As Schopen has shown in many magisterial works, the Vinayas are layered texts, so they undoubtedly contain material earlier than the fifth century, but even the earliest layers of the Vinaya texts cannot be earlier than Normative Buddhism, which is datable to the Saka-Kushan period. It thus would require rather more than the usual amount of credulity to project the ancestors of the cited texts back another half millennium or more to the time of the Buddha...
As for other well-known but evidently spurious "Asokan" inscriptions, note that the "Minor Pillar Inscription" at Lumbini not only mentions "Buddha" (as does, otherwise uniquely, the Calcutta-Bairat Inscription), it explicitly calls him Sakyamuni 'the Sage of the Scythians (Sakas)', who it says was born in Lumbini.
The use of the Sanskrit form of his epithet, Sakyamuni, rather than the Prakrit form, Sakamuni, is astounding and otherwise unattested until the late Gandhari documents; that fact alone rules out ascription to such an early period. But it is doubly astounding because this Sanskritism occurs in a text otherwise written completely in Mauryan Prakrit and Brahmi script. What is a Sanskrit form doing there? Sanskrit is not attested in any inscriptions or manuscripts until the Common Era or at most a few decades before it....
Perhaps most telling of all, the inscription is uniquely written in ordinary third person (not royal third person) and is in the past tense. That means the text is narrated by some unknown person and does not even pretend to have been proclaimed by its putative sponsor Devanampriya Priyadarsi, the king who authored the synoptic Major Inscriptions (nor of course by Devanampriya Asoka, who may have authored the synoptic Buddhist Inscriptions). It says that it records events that supposedly happened at some time in the past, but those events have been shown to be fictitious.
The inscription is strikingly unlike the unquestionably authentic Major Inscriptions in general, and based on its contents is much later in date than it evidently pretends to be. It is a spurious inscription....
Finally, the Delhi-Topra pillar includes a good version of the six synoptic Pillar Edicts, which are genuine Major Inscriptions, but it is followed by what is known as the "Seventh Pillar Edict". This is a section that occurs only on this particular monument -- not on any of the six other synoptic Pillar Edict monuments. It is "the longest of all the Asokan edicts. For the most part, it summarizes and restates the contents of the other pillar edicts, and to some extent those of the major rock edicts as well."
In fact, as Salomon suggests, it is a hodgepodge of the authentic inscriptions. It seems not to have been observed that such a melange could not have been compiled without someone going from stone to stone to collect passages from different inscriptions, and this presumably must have involved transmission in writing, unlike with the Major Rock Edict inscriptions, which were clearly dictated orally to scribes from each region of India, who then wrote down the texts in their own local dialects -- and in some cases, their own local script or language; knowledge of writing would seem to be required for that, but not actual written texts.
For the Delhi-Topra pillar addition, someone made copies of the texts and produced the unique "Seventh Pillar Edict".
bilingual Aramaic and Prakrit (both in Aramaic script) fragment from Kandahar known as Kandahar II or Kandahar III, which is written in an extremely odd fashion (Falk 2006: 246), has been identified as representing a portion of the "Seventh Pillar Edict" (Norman 2012: 43), but strong doubts remain about the reading of the text (Falk 2006: 246). It is also by no means exactly like the "Seventh Pillar Edict", not to speak of the peculiar presentation of text and translation. In fact, it looks like a student exercise. It is very similar to the content of the Taxila Inscription and the two Laghman Inscriptions, both of which are also highly problematic, q.v. Falk's (2006: 253) conclusion: "There is no clear evidence for an Asokan influence on this text [the Taxila Inscription]. Like the two Laghman 'edicts' this text as well could be of a rather profane nature, mentioning Asoka as king just in passing." However, Falk (2006: 241) also says of Kandahar II/III that "Asoka must have ordered to bring his words to the public unchanged regarding their sound and content. Presenting this text in two languages using one script for both is a remarkable thought, aimed at avoiding flaws in the translation." This is an unlikely speculation. Finally, the "Seventh Pillar Edict" shares some of the peculiarities of the other minor inscriptions from Afghanistan. (I.e., they are to be distinguished from the genuine fragments of a Greek translation of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Rock Edicts, found at Kandahar, q.v. Halkias 2014.) C. f. Ito (1996), a study of the Greek and Aramaic bilingual inscription from Kandahar. These texts all await detailed, serious study.]...
The "Seventh Pillar Edict" is palaeographically distinct from the text it has been appended to. It is obvious at first glance. The physical differences between the text of the "Seventh Pillar Edict", as compared even to the immediately preceding text of the Sixth Pillar Edict on the East Face, virtually leap out at one. The style of the script, the size and spacing of the letters, the poor control over consistency of style from one letter to the next, and the many hastily written, even scribbled, letters are all remarkable. These characteristics seem not to have been mentioned by the many scholars who have worked on the Mauryan inscriptions.
The text begins as an addition to the synoptic Sixth Pillar Edict, which occupies only part of the East Face "panel". After filling out the available space for text on the East Face, the new text incredibly continues around the pillar, that is, ignoring the four different "faces" already established by the earlier, genuine edicts. This circum-pillar format is unique among all the genuine Mauryan pillar inscriptions.
Another remarkable difference with respect to the genuine Major Inscriptions on pillars is that the latter are concerned almost exclusively with Devanampriya Priyadarsi's Dharma, but do not mention either the Sramanas ''Buddhists' or the Brahmanas 'Brahmanists' by name. This is strikingly unlike the Major Inscriptions on rocks, which mention them repeatedly in many of the edicts. In other words, though the Pillar Edicts are all dated later than the Rock Edicts, for some reason (perhaps their brevity), Devanampriya Priyadarsi does not mention the Sramanas or the Brahmanas in them. The "Seventh Pillar Edict" is thus unique in that it does mention the Buddhists (Sramanas) and Brahmanists (Brahmanas) by name, but the reoccurrence of the names in what claims to be the last of Devanampriya Priyadarsi's edicts suggests that the text is not just spurious, it is probably a deliberate forgery. This conclusion is further supported by the above-noted unique passage in the inscription in which the Buddhists are referred to as the "Samgha". This term occurs in the later Buddhist Inscriptions too; but it is problematic because it is otherwise unknown before well into the Saka-Kushan period.
The one really significant thing the text does is to add the claim that Devanampriya Priyadarsi supported not only the Buddhists and the Brahmanists but also the Ajivikas and Jains. However, all of the Jain holy texts are uncontestedly very late (long after the Mauryan period). The very mention of the sect in the same breath as the others is alone sufficient to cast severe doubt on the text's authenticity.
The "Seventh Pillar Edict" claims that it was inscribed when Devanampriya Priyadarsi had been enthroned for twenty-seven years; that is, only one year after the preceding text (the sixth of the synoptic Pillar Edicts), which says it was inscribed when Devanampriya Priyadarsi had been enthroned for twenty-six years. The "Seventh Pillar Edict" text consists of passages taken from many of the Major Inscriptions, both Rock and Pillar Edicts, in which the points mentioned are typically dated to one or another year after the ruler's coronation, but in the "Seventh Pillar Edict" the events are effectively dated to the same year. Most puzzling of all, why would the king add such an evidently important edict to only a single one of the otherwise completely synoptic pillar inscriptions?
Perhaps even more damning is the fact that in the text itself the very same passages are often repeated verbatim, sometimes (as near the beginning) immediately after they have just been stated, like mechanical dittoisms. Repetition is a known feature of Indian literary texts, but the way it occurs in the "Seventh Pillar Edict" is not attested in the authentic Major Inscriptions. Moreover, as Olivelle has noted, the text repeats the standard opening formula or "introductory refrain" many times; that is, "King Priyadarsin, Beloved of the Gods, says" is repeated verbatim nine times, with an additional shorter tenth repetition. "In all of the other edicts this refrain occurs only once and at the beginning. Such repetitions of the refrain which state that these are the words of the king are found in Persian inscriptions. However, this is quite unusual for Asoka."...
In short, based on its arrangement, palaeography, style, and contents, the "Seventh Pillar Edict" cannot be accepted as a genuine inscription of Devanampriya Priyadarsi. The text was added to the pillar much later than it claims and is an obvious forgery from a later historical period. These factors require that the "Seventh Pillar Edict" be removed from the corpus of authentic inscriptions of Devanampriya Priyadarsi.
The Calcutta-Bairat Inscription, the Lumbini Inscription, and the "Seventh Pillar Edict" of the Delhi-Topra pillar thus do not belong with either the authentic Major Inscriptions of Devanampriya Priyadarsi or the possibly authentic inscriptions of Devanampriya Asoka.
-- Greek Buddha: Pyrrho's Encounter With Early Buddhism in Central Asia, by Christopher I. Beckwith
The decipherment of Brahmi became the focus of European scholarly attention in the early 19th-century during East India Company rule in India, in particular in the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta.[10][11][12][13] Brahmi was deciphered by James Prinsep, the secretary of the Society, in a series of scholarly articles in the Society's journal in the 1830s.[14][15][16][17] His breakthroughs built on the epigraphic work of Christian Lassen, Edwin Norris, H. H. Wilson and Alexander Cunningham, among others.[18][19][20]
The origin of the script is still much debated, with most scholars stating that Brahmi was derived from or at least influenced by one or more contemporary Semitic scripts, while others favor the idea of an indigenous origin or connection to the much older and as yet undeciphered Indus script of the Indus Valley Civilization.[2][21] Brahmi was at one time referred to in English as the "pin-man" script,[22] that is "stick figure" script. It was known by a variety of other names, including "lath", "Laṭ", "Southern Aśokan", "Indian Pali" or "Mauryan" (Salomon 1998, p. 17), until the 1880s when Albert Étienne Jean Baptiste Terrien de Lacouperie, based on an observation by Gabriel Devéria, associated it with the Brahmi script, the first in a list of scripts mentioned in the Lalitavistara Sūtra. Thence the name was adopted in the influential work of Georg Bühler, albeit in the variant form "Brahma".[23] The Gupta script of the fifth century is sometimes called "Late Brahmi". The Brahmi script diversified into numerous local variants classified together as the Brahmic scripts. Dozens of modern scripts used across South and South East Asia have descended from Brahmi, making it one of the world's most influential writing traditions.[24][full citation needed] One survey found 198 scripts that ultimately derive from it.[25]
Among the inscriptions of Ashoka c. 3rd-century BCE written in the Brahmi script a few numerals were found, which have come to be called the Brahmi numerals.[26] The numerals are additive and multiplicative and, therefore, not place value;[26] it is not known if their underlying system of numeration has a connection to the Brahmi script.[???!!!][26] But in the second half of the first millennium CE, some inscriptions in India and Southeast Asia written in scripts derived from the Brahmi did include numerals that are decimal place value, and constitute the earliest existing material examples of the Hindu–Arabic numeral system, now in use throughout the world.[27] The underlying system of numeration, however, was older, as the earliest attested orally transmitted example dates to the middle of the 3rd century CE in a Sanskrit prose adaptation of a lost Greek work on astrology.[!!!][28][29][30]
Texts
A northern example of Brahmi epigraphy: ancient terracotta sculpture from Sugh "Child learning Brahmi", showing the first letters of the Brahmi alphabet, 2nd century BCE.[31]
The Brahmi script is mentioned in the ancient Indian texts of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism, as well as their Chinese translations.[32][33] For example, the Lipisala samdarshana parivarta lists 64 lipi (scripts), with the Brahmi script starting the list. The Lalitavistara Sūtra states that young Siddhartha, the future Gautama Buddha (~500 BCE), mastered philology, Brahmi and other scripts from the Brahmin Lipikāra and Deva Vidyāiṃha at a school.[34][32]
A list of eighteen ancient scripts is found in the texts of Jainism, such as the Pannavana Sutra (2nd century BCE) and the Samavayanga Sutra (3rd century BCE).[35][36] These Jaina script lists include Brahmi at number 1 and Kharoṣṭhi at number 4 but also Javanaliya (probably Greek) [!!!] and others not found in the Buddhist lists.[36]
Origins
Main article: Early Indian epigraphy
While the contemporary Kharoṣṭhī script is widely accepted to be a derivation of the Aramaic alphabet, the genesis of the Brahmi script is less straightforward. Salomon reviewed existing theories in 1998,[6] while Falk provided an overview in 1993.[37]
Early theories proposed a pictographic-acrophonic origin for the Brahmi script, on the model of the Egyptian hieroglyphic script. These ideas however have lost credence, as they are "purely imaginative and speculative".[38] Similar ideas have tried to connect the Brahmi script with the Indus script, but they remain unproven, and particularly suffer from the fact that the Indus script is as yet undeciphered.[38]
A later (mistaken) theory of a pictographic-acrophonic origin of the Brahmi script, on the model of the Egyptian hieroglyphic script, by Alexander Cunningham in 1877.
The mainstream view is that Brahmi has an origin in Semitic scripts (usually Aramaic). This is accepted by the vast majority of script scholars since the publications by Albrecht Weber (1856) and Georg Bühler's On the origin of the Indian Brahma alphabet (1895).[39][7] Bühler's ideas have been particularly influential, though even by the 1895 date of his opus on the subject, he could identify no fewer than five competing theories of the origin, one positing an indigenous origin and the others deriving it from various Semitic models.[40]
The most disputed point about the origin of the Brahmi script has long been whether it was a purely indigenous development or was borrowed or derived from scripts that originated outside India. Goyal (1979)[41] noted that most proponents of the indigenous view are fringe Indian scholars, whereas the theory of Semitic origin is held by "nearly all" Western scholars, and Salomon agrees with Goyal that there has been "nationalist bias" and "imperialist bias" on the two respective sides of the debate.[42] In spite of this, the view of indigenous development had been prevalent among British scholars writing prior to Bühler: A passage by Alexander Cunningham, one of the earliest indigenous origin proponents, suggests that, in his time, the indigenous origin was a preference of British scholars in opposition to the "unknown Western" origin preferred by continental scholars.[40] Cunningham in the seminal Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum of 1877 speculated that Brahmi characters were derived from, among other things, a pictographic principle based on the human body,[43] but Bühler noted that by 1891, Cunningham considered the origins of the script uncertain.
Heliodorus pillar in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Installed about 113 BCE and now named after Heliodorus, who was an ambassador of the Indo-Greek king Antialcidas from Taxila, and was sent to the Indian ruler Bhagabhadra. The pillar's Brahmi-script inscription states that Heliodorus is a Bhagvatena (devotee) of Vāsudeva. A couplet in it closely paraphrases a Sanskrit verse from the Mahabharata.[44][45]
A far more promising approach to the problem, indeed a short cut, seemed to be heralded in a letter to Jones from Lieutenant Francis Wilford, a surveyor and an enthusiastic student of all things oriental, who was based at Benares. Jones had been sent copies of inscriptions found at Ellora and written in Ashoka Brahmi, the still undeciphered pin-men. He had probably sent them to Wilford because Benares, the holy city of the Hindus, was the most likely place to find a Brahmin who might be able to read them. In 1793 Wilford announced that he had found just such a man:I have the honour to return to you the facsimile of several inscriptions with an explanation of them. I despaired at first of ever being able to decipher them... However, after many fruitless attempts on our part, we were so fortunate as to find at last an ancient sage, who gave us the key, and produced a book in Sanskrit, containing a great many ancient alphabets formerly in use in different parts of India. This was really a fortunate discovery, which hereafter may be of great service to us.
According to the ancient sage, most of Wilford's inscriptions related to the wanderings of the five heroic Pandava brothers from the Mahabharata. At the unspecified time in question they were under an obligation not to converse with the rest of mankind; so their friends devised a method of communicating with them by "writing short and obscure sentences on rocks and stones in the wilderness and in characters previously agreed upon betwixt them." The sage happened to have the key to these characters in his code book; obligingly he transcribed them into Devanagari Sanskrit and then translated them.
To be fair to Wilford, he was a bit suspicious about this ingenious explanation of how the inscriptions got there. But he had no doubts that the deciphering and translation were genuine. "Our having been able to decipher them is a great point in my opinion, as it may hereafter lead to further discoveries, that may ultimately crown our labours with success." Above all, he had now located the code book, "a most fortunate circumstance."
Poor Wilford was the laughing stock of the Benares Brahmins for a whole decade. They had already fobbed him off with Sanskrit texts, later proved spurious, on the source of the Nile and the origin of Mecca. After the code book there was a geographical treatise on The Sacred Isles of the West, which included early Hindu reference to the British Isles. The Brahmins, to whom Sanskrit had so long remained a sacred prerogative, were getting their own back. One wonders how much Wilford paid his "ancient sage."
Jones was already a little suspicious of Wilford's sources, but on the code book, which was as much a fabrication as the translations supposedly based on it, he reserved judgment until he might see it. He never did. In fact it was never heard of again. But in spite of these disappointments Jones continued to believe that in time this oldest script would be deciphered. He had been sent a copy of the writings on the Delhi pillar and told a correspondent that they "drive me to despair; you are right, I doubt not, in thinking them foreign; I believe them to be Ethiopian and to have been imported a thousand years before Christ." It was not one of his more inspired guesses and at the time of his death the mystery of the inscriptions and of the monoliths was as dark as ever.
-- India Discovered, by John Keay
Most scholars believe that Brahmi was likely derived from or influenced by a Semitic script model, with Aramaic being a leading candidate.[46] However, the issue is not settled due to the lack of direct evidence and unexplained differences between Aramaic, Kharoṣṭhī, and Brahmi.[47] Though Brahmi and the Kharoṣṭhī script share some general features, the differences between the Kharosthi and Brahmi scripts are "much greater than their similarities," and "the overall differences between the two render a direct linear development connection unlikely", states Richard Salomon.[48]
Virtually all authors accept that regardless of the origins, the differences between the Indian script and those proposed to have influenced it are significant. The degree of Indian development of the Brahmi script in both the graphic form and the structure has been extensive. It is also widely accepted that theories about the grammar of the Vedic language probably had a strong influence on this development. Some authors -– both Western and Indian -– suggest that Brahmi was borrowed or inspired by a Semitic script, invented in a short few years during the reign of Ashoka and then used widely for Ashokan inscriptions.[47]
The main thing which makes of the grammarians' Sanskrit a special and peculiar language is its list of roots. Of these there are reported to us about two thousand, with no intimation of any difference in character among them, or warning that a part of them may and that another part may not be drawn upon for forms to be actually used; all stand upon the same plane. But more than half — actually more than half — of them never have been met with, and never will be met with, in the Sanskrit literature of any age. When this fact began to come to light, it was long fondly hoped, or believed, that the missing elements would yet turn up in some corner of the literature not hitherto ransacked; but all expectation of that has now been abandoned. One or another does appear from time to time; but what are they among so many? The last notable case was that of the root stigh, discovered in the Maitrayani-Sanhita, a text of the Brahmana period; but the new roots found in such texts are apt to turn out wanting in the lists of the grammarians. Beyond all question, a certain number of cases are to be allowed for, of real roots, proved such by the occurrence of their evident cognates in other related languages, and chancing not to appear in the known literature; but they can go only a very small way indeed toward accounting for the eleven hundred unauthenticated roots. Others may have been assumed as underlying certain derivatives or bodies of derivatives — within due limits, a perfectly legitimate proceeding; but the cases thus explainable do not prove to be numerous. There remain then the great mass, whose presence in the lists no ingenuity has yet proved sufficient to account for. And in no small part, they bear their falsity and artificiality on the surface, in their phonetic form and in the meanings ascribed to them; we can confidently say that the Sanskrit language, known to us through a long period of development, neither had nor could have any such roots. How the grammarians came to concoct their list, rejected in practice by themselves and their own pupils, is hitherto an unexplained mystery. No special student of the native grammar, to my knowledge, has attempted to cast any light upon it; and it was left for Dr. Edgren, no partisan of the grammarians, to group and set forth the facts for the first time, in the Journal of the American Oriental Society (Vol. XI, 1882 [but the article printed in 1879], pp. 1-55), adding a list of the real roots, with brief particulars as to their occurrence.1 [I have myself now in press a much fuller account of the quotable roots of the language, with all their quotable tense-stems and primary derivatives — everything accompanied by a definition of the period of its known occurrence in the history of the language.] It is quite clear, with reference to this fundamental and most important item, of what character the grammarians' Sanskrit is. The real Sanskrit of the latest period is, as concerns its roots, a true successor to that of the earliest period, and through the known intermediates; it has lost some of the roots of its predecessors, as each of these some belonging to its own predecessors or predecessor; it has, also like these, won a certain number not earlier found: both in such measure as was to be expected. As for the rest of the asserted roots of the grammar, to account for them is not a matter that concerns at all the Sanskrit language and its history; it only concerns the history of the Hindu science of grammar. That, too, has come to be pretty generally acknowledged.1 [Not, indeed, universally; one may find among the selected verbs that are conjugated in full at the end of F. M. Muller's Sanskrit Grammar, no very small number of those that are utterly unknown to Sanskrit usage, ancient or modern.] Every one who knows anything of the history of Indo-European etymology knows how much mischief the grammarians' list of roots wrought in the hands of the earlier more incautious and credulous students of Sanskrit: how many false and worthless derivations were founded upon them. That sort of work, indeed, is not yet entirely a thing of the past; still, it has come to be well understood by most scholars that no alleged Sanskrit root can be accepted as real unless it is supported by such a use in the literary records of the language as authenticates it — for there are such things in the later language as artificial occurrences, forms made for once or twice from roots taken out of the grammarians' list, by a natural license, which one is only surprised not to see oftener availed of (there are hardly more than a dozen or two of such cases quotable): that they appear so seldom is the best evidence of the fact already pointed out above, that the grammar had, after all, only a superficial and negative influence upon the real tradition of the language.
It thus appears that a Hindu grammarian's statement as to the fundamental elements of his language is without authority until tested by the actual facts of the language, as represented by the Sanskrit literature. But the principle won here is likely to prove of universal application; for we have no reason to expect to find the grammarians absolutely trustworthy in other departments of their work, when they have failed so signally in one; there can be nothing in their system that will not require to be tested by the recorded facts of the language, in order to determine its true value....
A curious kind of superstition appears to prevail among certain Sanskrit scholars: they cannot feel that they have the right to accept a fact of the language unless they find it set down in Panini's rules. It may well be asked, on the contrary, of what consequence it is, except for its bearing on the grammatical science itself, whether a given fact is or is not so set down. A fact in the pre-classical language is confessedly quite independent of Panini; he may take account of it and he may not; and no one knows as yet what the ground is of the selection he makes for inclusion in his system. As for a fact in the classical language, it is altogether likely to fall within the reach of one of the great grammarian's rules — at least, as these have been extended and restricted and amended by his numerous successors: and this is a thing much to the credit of the grammar; but what bearing it has upon the language would be hard to say. If, however, we should seem to meet with a fact ignored by the grammar, or contravening its rules, we should have to look to see whether supporting facts in the language did not show its genuineness in spite of the grammar. On the other hand, there are facts in the language, especially in its latest records, which have a false show of existence, being the artificial product of the grammar's prescription or permission; and there was nothing but the healthy conservatism of the true tradition of the language to keep them from becoming vastly more numerous....
It needs to be impressed on the minds of scholars that the study of the Sanskrit language is one thing, and the study of the Hindu science of grammar another and a very different thing; that while there has been a time when the latter was the way to the former, that time is now long past, and the relation of the two reversed; that the present task of the students of the grammar is to make their science accessible, account if possible for its anomalies, and determine how much and what can be extracted from it to fill out that knowledge of the language which we derive from the literature; and that the peculiar Hindu ways of grouping and viewing and naming facts familiar to us from the other related languages are an obstacle in the way of a real and fruitful comprehension of those facts as they show themselves in Sanskrit, and should be avoided.
-- The Study of Hindu Grammar and the Study of Sanskrit, by William Dwight Whitney, American Journal of Philology, Vol. V, 3, Whole No. 19, 1884
The argument of "brahmanical fantasy" has been used in other areas as well. Cf. Mill's statement on the Brahmins above. Also, in connection with the Dhatupatha, a list of some two thousand verbal roots of which more than half have not been met with in Sanskrit literature, it has been suggested that it was "concocted" by the Indian grammarians (Whitney 1884; reprinted in Staal 1992: 142). In fact, the Indian pandits have been accused of inventing the Sanskrit language (Dugald Stewart and Christoph Meiners, quoted in Rosane Rocher 1983: 78).
-- Chapter 4: Law Books in an Oral Culture: The Indian Dharmasastras, Excerpt from "Studies in Hindu Law and Dharmaśastra", by Ludo Rocher
The Brahmi script appeared in the third century B.C. as a fully developed pan-Indian national script (sometimes used as a second script even within the proper territory of Kharosthi in the northwest) …
Terrien de Lacouperie… suggested that the name Brahmi should refer to the left-to-right "Indo-Pali" script of the Asokan pillar inscriptions, and Kharosthi to the right-to-left "Bactro-Pali" script of the rock inscriptions from the northwest. Lacouperie's suggestion was adopted by his contemporaries, most significantly by Buhler… While the name Brahmi for the ancient Indian national script is no doubt in a general sense correct, it should be kept in mind that we do not really know precisely what form or derivative of the script the authors of the early script lists were referring to as "Brahmi," nor whether this term was actually applied to the script used in the time of Asoka.41 [On this point, see the warnings in IC 11.667 [L. Renou and J. Filliozat, L'Inde classique (Classical India, by Louis Renou and Jean Filliozat, Classical India Volume Two, Political History of India From the Earliest Times to the 7th Century A.D., by Jean Filliozat, Translated from the French by Philip Spratt, 1957)] and OBS 99 [S. P. Gupta and K. S. Ramachandran, The Origin of Brahmi Script].VI.
The key papers by Dr. S.R. Goyal and Shri K.V. Soundara Rajan are very interesting and have raised several important points connected with the origin of the Brahmi script. Goyal's paper especially interested me because I also share most of his views. But before involving into the discussion I wish to point out that Goyal has not been able to take note of all the published material on the subject during the last two decades. For example, he seems to have failed to utilise and analyse properly the views of Dani, Upasaka and the present author on the subject. As it may be pointed out that it was Upasaka who, for the first time, has conclusively proved by giving a diagram that Yerragudi inscription of Asoka follows no method. Mr Soundara Rajan also does not seem to have utilised these recent publications thoroughly.
The first confusing thing about the origin of Brahmi script is its name. The late Prof R.R Pandey observes, "As its-very name suggests the Brahmi script was invented by the Indo-Aryans for the preservation of 'Brahma' or Veda and was originally and mainly employed by the Brahmanas, whose duty was to conserve the Vedic literature and to hand it down to the succeeding generations by writing and copying the text from time to time and by teaching them to their students".91 [Pandey, R.B., Indian Palaeography, p. 35.] This confusion is due to the name Brahmi. It was perhaps Buhler who first advocated this designation for the characters in which majority of the edicts of Asoka are written. But there is no definite ground to accept that the name Brahmi given to the Asokan script is correct beyond doubt. In Buddhist and Jaina works lists of the scripts prevalent in ancient India are given. Almost all the lists begin with the name Brahmi. In Vedic literature there are some references where the word 'Brahmi' occurs but there it has been used in the sense of a speech (Brahmi-Vak) and not in the sense of a script.92 [Pathak, V.S., Brahmi athava Brahmi Vaidika Bhasha aur Lip (Hindi), Madhay Bharati, Vol. II, pp. 13-16.] Therefore, the designation Brahmi to the script of Asoka and its derivatives is simply a matter of convenience and not a matter of fact. Dr Pandey's view that 'as the very name suggests the script was invented by the Indo-Aryans for the preservation of Brahma or Veda' is illusory because he presupposes the name Brahmi for that script. Goyal himself does not make any distinction between the two while writing the lines under the heading Traditional Inventor of Brahmi'. This has resulted in the confusion between two separate issues, i.e., the antiquity of the art of writing in India and the origin of the so-called (Asokan) Brahmi. This has inspired many scholars to search for the latter's roots in Vedic period. Although sceptic about accepting the name Brahmi for the Asokan script we will refer this name on following pages to avoid any possible confusion.
-- The Origin of Brahmi Script, by S.P. Gupta and K.S. Ramachandran, 1979The various inscriptions which were not made in order to be read must be interpreted as magical, at least in this sense that they were votive, and intended not to make their prayers public but to bring about their realisation by materialising the expression in writing.
-- A Portion translated from l'Inde Classique, Vol. I, Manuel Des Etudes Indiennes, Classical India, by Louis Renou and Jean Filliozat, Classical India Volume Two, Political History of India From the Earliest Times to the 7th Century A.D., by Jean Filliozat, Translated from the French by Philip Spratt, 1957
The name Brahmi is thus used loosely, as a matter of convenience, by modern scholars to refer to the Asokan script and to its varieties and earlier derivatives (distinguished by regional or dynastic terms such as "early southern Brahmi" or "eastern Gupta Brahmi") until about the end of the Gupta period in the sixth century A.D. After this time, the scripts have for the most part differentiated into distinct regional and local varieties, and are conceived as separate scripts denoted by descriptive or, more commonly, geographical terms (e.g., Siddhamatrka [post-Gupta northern script] or proto-Kannada). The terminology for the various premodern Brahmi-derived scripts is, however, largely unstandardized and typically made up ad hoc, due mainly to the lack of attested indigenous terms for many of them....
The origin of the Brahmi script is one of the most problematic and controversial problems in Indian epigraphy ...
Recently several writers have put forth theories to the effect that Brahmi was purposefully invented ex nihilo ["creation out of nothing"] in or around the time of Asoka. S. R. Goyal, for example, 55 ["Brahmi—An Invention of the Early Mauryan Period," in OBS 1-53.] argued that the phonetically logical structure, primary geometric forms, and geographical uniformity of early Brahml show that it was "an invention of the grammarians" of the time of Asoka. Similar arguments were presented by T. P. Verma, who proposed an origin in Buddhist circles.56 [The Palaeography of Brahmi Script in North India, 8, and "Fresh Light on the Origin of Brahmi Alphabet," JOI 13, 1964, 360-71 (esp. 367).] ...
The strongest point in favor of the invention theory is the stiffly symmetrical, geometric appearance of Asokan Brahmi, which does indeed give the impression of an arbitrarily created script....
[T]he discovery ... of six Mauryan inscriptions in Aramaic strongly supports the hypothesis of an Aramaic connection.
However, a possible objection to the derivation of Brahmi from Aramaic is that, since it has been established with virtual certainty that the Kharosthi script is derived from Aramaic, it is hard to see why another, very different, Indic script would have developed from the same prototype in a contiguous region. If the hypothesis of the invention of Brahmi under Asoka's sponsorship is correct, this re-creation may be attributed to the emperor's desire to invent a distinct imperial script, perhaps under the inspiration of Old Persian cuneiform, which would be suited to the promulgation of edicts in written form….
Prinsep's final decipherment was ultimately to rely on paleographic and contextual rather than statistical methods.
-- Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages, by Richard Salomon
In contrast, some authors reject the idea of foreign influence.[49][50]
Bruce Trigger states that Brahmi likely emerged from the Aramaic script but with extensive local development but there is no evidence of a direct common source.[51] According to Trigger, Brahmi was in use before the Ashoka pillars, at least by 4th or 5th century BCE in Sri Lanka and India, while Kharoṣṭhī was used only in northwest South Asia (eastern parts of modern Afghanistan and neighboring regions of Pakistan) for a while before it died out in ancient times.[51] According to Salomon, the evidence of Kharosthi script's use is found primarily in Buddhist records and those of Indo-Greek, Indo-Scythian, Indo-Parthian and Kushana dynasty era. The Kharosthi likely fell out of general use in or about the 3rd-century CE.[48]
Justeson and Stephens proposed that this inherent vowel system in Brahmi and Kharoṣṭhī developed by transmission of a Semitic abjad through the recitation of its letter values. The idea is that learners of the source alphabet recite the sounds by combining the consonant with an unmarked vowel, e.g. /kə/,/kʰə/,/gə/, and in the process of borrowing into another language, these syllables are taken to be the sound values of the symbols. They also accepted the idea that Brahmi was based on a North Semitic model.[52]
Semitic model hypothesis
Bühler's aspirate derivations
IAST / -aspirate / +aspirate / origin of aspirate according to Bühler
k/kh / [x] / [x] / Semitic emphatic (qoph)
g/gh / [x] / [x] / Semitic emphatic (heth) (hook addition in Bhattiprolu script)
c/ch / [x] / [x] / curve addition
j/jh / [x] / [x] / hook addition with some alteration
p/ph / [x] / [x] / curve addition
b/bh / [x] / [x] / hook addition with some alteration
t/th / [x] / [x] / Semitic emphatic (teth)
d/dh / [x] / [x] / unaspirated glyph back formed
ṭ/ṭh / [x] / [x] / unaspirated glyph back formed as if aspirated glyph with curve
ḍ/ḍh / [x] / [x] / curve addition
Many scholars link the origin of Brahmi to Semitic script models, particularly Aramaic.[39] The explanation of how this might have happened, the particular Semitic script and the chronology have been the subject of much debate. Bühler followed Max Weber in connecting it particularly to Phoenician and proposed an early 8th century BCE date[53] for the borrowing. A link to the South Semitic scripts, a less prominent branch of the Semitic script family, has occasionally been proposed but has not gained much acceptance.[54] Finally, the Aramaic script being the prototype for Brahmi has been the more preferred hypothesis because of its geographic proximity to the Indian subcontinent, and its influence likely arising because Aramaic was the bureaucratic language of the Achaemenid empire. However, this hypothesis does not explain the mystery of why two very different scripts, Kharoṣṭhī and Brahmi, developed from the same Aramaic. A possible explanation might be that Ashoka created an imperial script for his edicts, but there is no evidence to support this conjecture.[55]
The below chart shows the close resemblance that Brahmi has with the first four letters of Semitic script, the first column representing the Phoenician alphabet.
Image / Text / Name[56] / Phoneme / Hieroglyphs / Proto-Sinaitic / Aramaic / Hebrew / Syriac / Greek / Brahmi
Bühler's hypothesis
According to the Semitic hypothesis as laid out by Bühler in 1898, the oldest Brahmi inscriptions were derived from a Phoenician prototype.[57][note 1] Salomon states Bühler's arguments are "weak historical, geographical, and chronological justifications for a Phoenician prototype". Discoveries made since Bühler's proposal, such as of six Mauryan inscriptions in Aramaic, suggest Bühler's proposal about Phoenician as weak. It is more likely that Aramaic, which was virtually certainly the prototype for Kharoṣṭhī, also may have been the basis for Brahmi. However, it is unclear why the ancient Indians would have developed two very different scripts.[55]
Comparison of North Semitic and Brahmi scripts[59][note 2]
Phoenician /Aramaic / Value / Brahmi / Value
According to Bühler, Brahmi added symbols for certain sounds not found in Semitic languages, and either deleted or repurposed symbols for Aramaic sounds not found in Prakrit. For example, Aramaic lacks the phonetic retroflex feature that appears among Prakrit dental stops, such as ḍ, and in Brahmi the symbols of the retroflex and non-retroflex consonants are graphically very similar, as if both had been derived from a single prototype. (See Tibetan alphabet for a similar later development.) Aramaic did not have Brahmi's aspirated consonants (kh, th, etc.), whereas Brahmi did not have Aramaic's emphatic consonants (q, ṭ, [x]), and it appears that these unneeded emphatic letters filled in for some of Brahmi's aspirates: Aramaic q for Brahmi kh, Aramaic [x] ([x]) for Brahmi th ([x]), etc. And just where Aramaic did not have a corresponding emphatic stop, p, Brahmi seems to have doubled up for the corresponding aspirate: Brahmi p and ph are graphically very similar, as if taken from the same source in Aramaic p. Bühler saw a systematic derivational principle for the other aspirates ch, jh, ph, bh, and dh, which involved adding a curve or upward hook to the right side of the character (which has been speculated to derive from h, Brahmi [x]), while d and [x] (not to be confused with the Semitic emphatic [x]) were derived by back formation from dh and ṭh.[61]
The attached table lists the correspondences between Brahmi and North Semitic scripts.[62][59]
Bühler states that both Phoenician and Brahmi had three voiceless sibilants, but because the alphabetical ordering was lost, the correspondences among them are not clear. Bühler was able to suggest Brahmi derivatives corresponding to all of the 22 North Semitic characters, though clearly, as Bühler himself recognized, some are more confident than others. He tended to place much weight on phonetic congruence as a guideline, for example connecting c [x] to tsade [x] rather than kaph [x], as preferred by many of his predecessors.
One of the key problems with a Phoenician derivation is the lack of evidence for historical contact with Phoenicians in the relevant period.[55] Bühler explained this by proposing that the initial borrowing of Brahmi characters dates back considerably earlier than the earliest known evidence, as far back as 800 BCE, contemporary with the Phoenician glyph forms that he mainly compared. Bühler cited a near-modern practice of writing Brahmic scripts informally without vowel diacritics as a possible continuation of this earlier abjad-like stage in development.[53]
The weakest forms of the Semitic hypothesis are similar to Gnanadesikan's trans-cultural diffusion view of the development of Brahmi and Kharoṣṭhī, in which the idea of alphabetic sound representation was learned from the Aramaic-speaking Persians, but much of the writing system was a novel development tailored to the phonology of Prakrit.[63]
The Prakrits were Middle Indo-Aryan languages spoken between about 500 B.C. and 500 A.D. The name Prakrit (prākṛta) means ‘derived’, a name contrasting with Sanskrit (saṃskṛta) ‘complete, perfected’, reflecting the fact that the Prakrit languages were considered historically secondary to, and less prestigious than, Sanskrit.
The oldest stage of Middle Indo-Aryan language is attested in the inscriptions of Ashoka (ca. 260 BCE), as well as in the earliest forms of Pāli, the language of the Theravāda Buddhist canon. The most prominent form of Prakrit is Ardhamāgadhı̄, associated with the ancient kingdom of Magadha, in modern Bihar, and the subsequent Mauryan Empire. Mahāvı̄ra, the founder of Jainism, was born in Magadha, and the earliest Jain texts were composed in Ardhamāgadhı̄.
The other main Prakrit languages include Māhārāṣṭrı̄, Śaurasenī, Māgadhī, and Avantī, used in dramatic literature and lyric poetry, and Gāndhārī, a far North-Western Indo-Aryan language once used extensively as a language of Buddhist literature in Central Asia. The latest Middle Indo-Aryan period is represented by the Apabhraṃśas, used as literary languages from around the 8th century A.D. well into the second millennium.
Ardhamāgadhı̄ and some other forms of Prakrit became learned, literary languages, much like Classical Sanskrit, but at the earliest period originated as either genuine vernacular dialects, or as lingua francas based on such dialects. It was these vernacular dialects which ultimately developed into the Modern Indo-Aryan languages spoken across South Asia today.
Currently there is no independent degree in Prakrit, but it is offered as a subsidiary language for the BA in Sanskrit. Students will study Prakrit language and literature, as well as the doctrine and early history of Jainism. Students on graduate courses in Indian Studies may also attend Prakrit classes when these are offered.
-- Prakrit, by Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford
Another evidence cited in favor of Persian influence has been the Hultzsch proposal in 1925 that the Prakrit/Sanskrit word for writing itself, lipi is similar to the Old Persian word dipi, suggesting a probable borrowing.[64][65] A few of the Ashoka edicts from the region nearest the Persian empire use dipi as the Prakrit word for writing, which appears as lipi elsewhere, and this geographic distribution has long been taken, at least back to Bühler's time, as an indication that the standard lipi form is a later alteration that appeared as it diffused away from the Persian sphere of influence. Persian dipi itself is thought to be an Elamite loanword.[66]