Brahmi

Script Details

Brahmi

This is the Photograph of Ashoka's Edict at Maski, District Raichur, Karnataka State, India

By Ashok tapase, source: own work, date: 8 October 2011

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Data

ISO 15924 Brah 300
Type Abugida
Family Indic
Direction LTR RtL (less common, but still found)
Diacritics Yes
Contextual Forms No
Capitals Used No
Glyphs 52
Inventor Unknown
Earliest Location Karnataka, India
Earliest Date 300 BCE
Latest Date 1000 CE
Ancestry

Overview

The parentage of Brahmi is somewhat problematic thus judgement should be left up to the reader as to whether the language is of Aramaic, and thus Semitic, or Indus origin.

The earliest uses of this script are from the Buddhist inscriptions known as the Ashoka edicts from the 3rd century CE. In his work, The Origin of the Brahmi and Tami scripts, Righter (1993) asserts that, the language of the edicts is mostly Prakrit or Pali, and ... it is more likely that the Buddhist King made only use of an invention that was already known for several centuries (320.)“

Rodgers (2005) agrees with Righter's claim, and adds that, “People ordinarily spoke Prakrit, a descendant of Sanskrit. The [Ashokan] inscriptions were in Prakrit, not Sanskrit, presumably so that htey could be more widely understood by the people (204).”

Bibliography

Author Year Publication Publisher
Righter, Egbert 1991 The Origin of the Brahami and Tami Scripts; Vol. No. XII Nos. 3 & 4 - April 1993, Pages 320-336 Ancient Science of Life
Rogers, Henry 2005 Writing Systems: A Linguistic Approach, p. 203-213 Blackwell Publishing,\
Salomon, Richard 1996 The World's Writing Systems, Brahmi and Kharoshthi, 373-381 Oxford University Press
Salomon, Richard 1995 Review: On the Origin of the Early Indian Scripts; Vol. 115, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1995), pp. 271-279 Journal of the American Oriental Society
Salomon, Richard 1998 Indian Epigraphy : A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages; p. 17-71 Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Scharfe, Hartmut 2002 Kharoṣṭī and Brāhmī Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 122, No. 2, Indic and Iranian Studies in Honor of Stanley Insler on His Sixty-Fifth Birthday (Apr. - Jun., 2002), pp. 391-393