46 Facts About Brahmi script

Brahmi script is an abugida which uses a system of diacritical marks to associate vowels with consonant symbols.

The decipherment of Brahmi script 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.

Brahmi script was deciphered by James Prinsep, the secretary of the Society, in a series of scholarly articles in the Society's journal in the 1830s.

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 Harappan culture.

Brahmi script is mentioned in the ancient Indian texts of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism, as well as their Chinese translations.

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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, but Buhler noted that by 1891, Cunningham considered the origins of the script uncertain.

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.

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.

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.

Chart below shows the close resemblance that Brahmi has with the first four letters of Semitic script, the first column representing the Phoenician alphabet.

Buhler states that both Phoenician and Brahmi script had three voiceless sibilants, but because the alphabetical ordering was lost, the correspondences among them are not clear.

Buhler was able to suggest Brahmi script derivatives corresponding to all of the 22 North Semitic characters, though clearly, as Buhler himself recognized, some are more confident than others.

Brahmi script tended to place much weight on phonetic congruence as a guideline, for example connecting c to tsade ?? rather than kaph ??, as preferred by many of his predecessors.

Weakest forms of the Semitic hypothesis are similar to Gnanadesikan's trans-cultural diffusion view of the development of Brahmi script and Kharosthi, 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.

Falk sees the basic writing system of Brahmi as being derived from the Kharosthi script, itself a derivative of Aramaic.

Further, adds Salomon, in a "limited sense Brahmi can be said to be derived from Kharosthi, but in terms of the actual forms of the characters, the differences between the two Indian scripts are much greater than the similarities".

Further, states Salomon, Falk accepts there are anomalies in phonetic value and diacritics in Brahmi script that are not found in the presumed Kharosthi script source.

Possibility of an indigenous origin such as a connection to the Indus Brahmi script is supported by some Western and Indian scholars and writers.

The theory that there are similarities to the Indus Brahmi script was suggested by early European scholars such as the archaeologist John Marshall and the Assyriologist Stephen Langdon.

British archaeologist Raymond Allchin stated that there is a powerful argument against the idea that the Brahmi script has Semitic borrowing because the whole structure and conception is quite different.

Evidence for a continuity between Indus and Brahmi has been seen in graphic similarities between Brahmi and the late Indus script, where the ten most common ligatures correspond with the form of one of the ten most common glyphs in Brahmi.

Furthermore, there is no accepted decipherment of the Indus Brahmi script, which makes theories based on claimed decipherments tenuous.

Fabri proposed that symbols found on Mauryan punch-marked coins were remnants of the Indus Brahmi script that had survived the collapse of the Indus civilization.

Kenneth Norman suggests that Brahmi script was devised over a longer period of time predating Ashoka's rule:.

Brahmi script suggests a date of not later than the end of the 4th century for the development of Brahmi script in the form represented in the inscriptions, with earlier possible antecedents.

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The Brahmi script is missing from the list of 18 scripts in the surviving versions of two later Jaina Sutras, namely the Vishesha Avashyaka and the Kalpa Sutra.

One of the most important recent developments regarding the origin of Brahmi script has been the discovery of Brahmi script characters inscribed on fragments of pottery from the trading town of Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka, which have been dated between the sixth to early fourth century BCE.

Salomon in his 1998 review states that the Anuradhapura inscriptions support the theory that Brahmi existed in South Asia before the Mauryan times, with studies favoring the 4th century BCE, but some doubts remain whether the inscriptions might be intrusive into the potsherds from a later date.

Calligraphy of the Brahmi script remained virtually unchanged from the time of the Maurya Empire to the end of the 1st century BCE.

Inscriptions of the 6th century CE in late Brahmi were already deciphered in 1785 by Charles Wilkins, who published an essentially correct translation of the Gopika Cave Inscription written by the Maukhari king Anantavarman.

Brahmi script was able to correctly guess four out of five vocalic inflections, but the value of consonants remained unknown.

Tamil-Brahmi script is a variant of the Brahmi script alphabet that was in use in South India by about 3rd century BCE, particularly in Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

The language used in around 70 Southern Brahmi inscriptions discovered in the 20th century have been identified as a Prakrit language.

The language of Sri Lanka Brahmi inscriptions has been mostly been Prakrit though some Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions have been found, such as the Annaicoddai seal.

Additional Tamil Brahmi inscription has been found in Khor Rori region of Oman on an archaeological site storage jar.

Brahmi script is usually written from left to right, as in the case of its descendants.

Brahmi script is an abugida, meaning that each letter represents a consonant, while vowels are written with obligatory diacritics called matras in Sanskrit, except when the vowels begin a word.

Collation order of Brahmi is believed to have been the same as most of its descendant scripts, one based on Shiksha, the traditional Vedic theory of Sanskrit phonology.

Brahmi script is generally classified in three main types, which represent three main historical stages of its evolution over nearly a millennium:.

Early "Ashokan" Brahmi script is regular and geometric, and organized in a very rational fashion:.

Early Ashokan Brahmi script was added to the Unicode Standard in October, 2010 with the release of version 6.

Brahmi script was the medium for some of the most famous inscriptions of ancient India, starting with the Edicts of Ashoka, circa 250 BCE.

Southern Brahmi gave rise to the Grantha alphabet, the Vatteluttu alphabet (8th century), and due to the contact of Hinduism with Southeast Asia during the early centuries CE, gave rise to the Baybayin in the Philippines, the Javanese script in Indonesia, the Khmer alphabet in Cambodia, and the Old Mon script in Burma.

Brahmi script evolved into the Nagari script which in turn evolved into Devanagari and Nandinagari.

The resulting Brahmi script is widely adopted across India to write Sanskrit, Marathi, Hindi and its dialects, and Konkani.

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Arrangement of Brahmi script was adopted as the modern order of Japanese kana, though the letters themselves are unrelated.