Brahmi
refers to the pre-modern members of the Brahmic family of scripts. The best known inscriptions in are the rock-cut
edicts of Ashoka, dating to the
3rd century BCE. These were long considered the earliest examples of Brahmi writing, but recent archeological evidence in
Sri Lanka and
Tamil Nadu,
India suggest the dates for the earliest use of Brahmi to be be around the 6th century BC, dated using
radiocarbon and thermoluminescence dating methods.
This script is ancestral to most of the scripts of
South Asia,
Southeast Asia,
Tibet,
Mongolia,
Manchuria, and perhaps even
Korean
Hangul.
Encyclopedia
refers to the pre-modern members of the Brahmic family of scripts. The best known inscriptions in are the rock-cut
edicts of Ashoka, dating to the
3rd century BCE. These were long considered the earliest examples of Brahmi writing, but recent archeological evidence in
Sri Lanka and
Tamil Nadu,
India suggest the dates for the earliest use of Brahmi to be be around the 6th century BC, dated using
radiocarbon and thermoluminescence dating methods.
This script is ancestral to most of the scripts of
South Asia,
Southeast Asia,
Tibet,
Mongolia,
Manchuria, and perhaps even
Korean
Hangul. The
Brahmi numeral system is the ancestor of the
Hindu-Arabic numerals, which are now used world-wide.
Origins
is believed by some to be derived from a
Semitic script such as the Imperial
Aramaic alphabet, as was clearly the case for the contemporary
Kharosthi alphabet that arose in a part of northwest Indian under the control of the
Achaemenid Empire. Rhys Davids suggests that writing may have been introduced to India from the
Middle East by traders. Another possibility is with the
Achaemenid conquest in the late 6th century BC. It was often assumed that it was a planned invention under
Ashoka as a prerequiste for his edicts. Compare the much better documented parallel of the
Hangul script.
Older examples of the Brahmi script appear to be on fragments of pottery from the trading town of
Anuradhapura in
Sri Lanka, which have been dated to the early 5th century BC. Even earlier evidence of the Brahmi script has been discovered on pieces of pottery in Adichanallur,
Tamil Nadu, India. Radio-carbon dating has established that they
belonged to the 6th century BC.
A glance at the oldest inscriptions shows striking parallels with contemporary Aramaic for a few of the phonemes that are equivalent between the two languages, especially if the letters are flipped to reflect the change in writing direction.
However, Semitic is not a good phonological match to Indic, so any Semitic alphabet would have needed extensive modification. Indeed, this is the most convincing circumstantial evidence for a link: the similarities between the scripts are just what one would expect from such an adaptation. For example, Aramaic did not distinguish dental from
retroflex stops; in the dental and retroflex series are graphically very similar, as if both had been derived from a single prototype. Aramaic did not have aspirated consonants , whereas did not have Aramaic's emphatic consonants ; and it appears that Aramaic's extra emphatic letters may have been used to fill in missing aspirates . And just where Aramaic did not have a corresponding emphatic stop,
p, seems to have doubled up for its aspirate:
p and
ph are graphically very similar, as if taken from the same source. The first letters of the alphabets also match:
a looks a lot like Aramaic
alef.
According to others was a purely indigenous development, perhaps with the
Indus script as its predecessor; these include the English scholars G.R. Hunter and Raymond Allchin.
Further reading
- Kenneth R. Norman's, The Development of Writing in India and its Effect upon the Pâli Canon, in Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde Südasiens , 1993
- Oscar von Hinüber, Der Beginn der Schrift und frühe Schriftlichkeit in Indien, Franz Steiner Verlag, 1990
- Gérard Fussman's, Les premiers systèmes d'écriture en Inde, in Annuaire du Collège de France 1988-1989
- Siran Deraniyagala's The prehistory of Sri Lanka; an ecological perspective , Archaeological Survey Department of Sri Lanka, 1992.
External links
- by Richard Salomon, University of Washington
- of the Indian Institute of Science
- urn from Piprahwa with the inscription in Brahmi
- PROCEEDINGS OF THE XIII INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS of the UNION OF PREHISTORIC AND PROTOHISTORIC SCIENCES
