Brahmi script

Brāhmī is the modern name given to one of the oldest writing systems used in the Indian subcontinent and in Central Asia during the final centuries BCE and the early centuries CE. Like its contemporary, Kharoṣṭhī, which was used in what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan, it was an abugida.

The best-known Brahmi inscriptions are the rock-cut edicts of Ashoka in north-central India, dated to 250–232 BCE. The script was deciphered in 1837 by James Prinsep, an archaeologist, philologist, and official of the East India Company.^[1] The origin of the script is still much debated, with current Western academic opinion generally agreeing (with some exceptions) that Brahmi was derived from or at least influenced by one or more contemporary Semitic scripts, but a current of opinion in India favors the idea that it is connected to the much older and as-yet undeciphered Indus script.^[2]:20

Brahmi was at one time referred to in English as the "pin-man" script,^[3] that is "stick figure" script. It was denoted by a variety of other names until the 1880s when A.E.J.B. Terrien de Lacouperie, based on an observation by Gabriel Devéria, associated it with Brāhmī, 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".^[4] The Gupta script of the 5th 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 Asia have descended from Brahmi, making it one of the world's most influential writing traditions.^[5] One survey found 198 scripts that ultimately derive from it.^[6]

Origins

A fragment of Ashoka's 6th pillar edict.

Coin of Vikramaditya (Chandragupta II) with the name of the king in Brahmi script 380-415 CE.

G R Hunter's comparison of Indus Script and Brahmi Script

While the contemporary and perhaps somewhat older Kharosthi script is widely accepted to be a derivation of the Aramaic script, the genesis of the Brahmi script is less straightforward. Salomon gave a thorough review of existing theories in 1998,^[2]:19–30 and only a limited overview of the more pertinent aspects of this very extensive topic can be presented here.

An origin in the Imperial Aramaic script has been proposed by some scholars since the publications by Albrecht Weber (1856) and Georg Bühler's On the origin of the Indian Brahma alphabet (1895).^{[7]:378 [8]} Bühler's ideas have been particularly influential, though even by the 1895 date of his opus on the subject, he could identify no less than five competing theories of the origin, one positing an indigenous origin and the others deriving it from various Semitic models.^[9]

Like Kharosthi, Brāhmī was used to write the early dialects of Prakrit, the lingua franca at the time. Surviving records of the script are mostly restricted to inscriptions on buildings and graves as well as liturgical texts. Sanskrit was not written until many centuries later, and as a result, Brāhmī is not a perfect match for Sanskrit; several Sanskrit sounds cannot be written in Brāhmī.^[7]:377

The most disputed point about the origin of the Brāhmī script is whether it was a purely indigenous development or was inspired or derived from scripts that originated outside India. Salomon noted that the indigenous view is strongly preferred by Indian scholars, whereas the idea of borrowing or influence from a Semitic script is preferred most often by Western scholars. He agreed with S.R. Goyal that biases have influenced both sides of the debate.^[2]:20 Bühler curiously cited a passage by Sir Alexander Cunningham, one of the earliest indigenous origin proponents, that indicated that, in his time, the indigenous origin was a preference of English scholars in opposition to the "unknown Western" origin preferred by continental scholars.^[9] Cunningham in the seminal Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum of 1877 speculated that the Brahmi characters were derived from a pictographic principle based on the human body,^[10] but Bühler noted that by 1891, Cunningham considered the origins of the script uncertain.

Among scholars who have taken the origin to have been purely indigenous are F. Raymond Allchin, who speculated in a personal communication that Brahmi perhaps had the Harappan script (i.e. Indus script) as its predecessor.^[11] However, Allchin and Erdosy later in 1995 expressed the opinion that there was as yet insufficient evidence to resolve the question, though they were confident that the development of Brahmi was earlier than and "quite independent" of the Aramaic derivation of Kharosthi.^[12] G.R. Hunter in his book The Script of Harappa and Mohenjodaro and Its Connection with Other Scripts (1934) proposed a derivation of the Brahmi alphabets from the Indus Script, the match being considerably higher than that of Aramaic in his estimation.^[13] The most prominent alternative view in the indigenous origin category is that Brahmi was invented entirely independently of either foreign scripts or the Indus script.^[2]:21 This view usually accepts that the Mauryans were previously aware of the art of writing in general but proposes that Brahmi was created anew for the purposes of writing Prakrit, based on well established theories of Vedic grammar and phonetics, and probably on the order of the reform-minded King Ashoka. From this point of view, Brahmi might be seen as a successful attempt to remedy some of the apparent limitations of Kharosthi as a vehicle for writing Prakrit.^[14] Similarities to the Indus script have been claimed by Subhash Kak—who does not acknowledge the existence of the Semitic-origin theory—^[15] based on an interaction between the Indic and the Semitic worlds prior to the rise of the Semitic scripts.^[16]

The evidence for writing during the millennium and a half between the collapse of the Indus Valley Civilization c. 1900 BCE and the first widely accepted appearance of Brahmi in the 3rd century BCE (the Ashoka edicts) is contested (earlier dates for Brahmi are claimed, but not widely accepted—see South Indian epigraphy below), and there is no accepted decipherment of the Indus script. A promising possible link between the Indus script and later writing traditions may be in the graffiti of the South Indian megalithic culture, which may have some overlap with the Indus symbol inventory and persisted in use up at least through the appearance of the Brahmi and Tamil Brahmi scripts up into the 3rd century CE. These graffiti usually appear singly, though on occasion may be found in groups of two or three, and are thought to have been family, clan, or religious symbols.^[17]

There appears to be general agreement at least that Brahmi and Kharosthi are historically related, though much disagreement persists about the nature of this relationship. Bruce Trigger considered them, as a pair, to be one of four instances of the invention of an alphasyllabary, the other three being Old Persian cuneiform, the Meroitic script, and the Ge'ez script. All four of these have striking similarities, such as using short /a/ as an inherent vowel, but Trigger (who accepted the Aramaic inspiration of Brahmi with extensive local development, along with a pre-Ashokan date) was unable to find a direct common source among them.^[18] Gnanadesikan also posited a stimulus diffusion view of the development of Brahmi 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.^[19]

Aramaic hypothesis

The Semitic theory (Phoenician or Aramaic) is the more popular theory among western scholars.^[7]:378 According to the Aramaic hypothesis, the oldest Brāhmī inscriptions show striking parallels with contemporary Aramaic for the sounds that are congruent between the two languages, especially if the letters are flipped to reflect the change in writing direction.^{[9]:59,68,71,75} (Aramaic is written from right to left, as are several early examples of Brāhmī.^[7]) For example, both Brāhmī and Aramaic g resemble Λ; both Brāhmī and Aramaic t resemble ʎ, etc.

Brāhmī does feature a number of extensions to the Aramaic alphabet, as it was required to write more sounds. For example, Aramaic did not distinguish dental stops such as d from retroflex consonants such as ḍ, and in Brāhmī the dental and retroflex series are graphically very similar, as if both had been derived from a single Aramaic prototype. (See Tibetan alphabet for a similar later development.) Aramaic did not have Brāhmī’s aspirated consonants (kh, th, etc.), whereas Brāhmī did not have Aramaic's emphatic consonants (q, ṭ, ṣ), and it appears that these unneeded emphatic letters filled in for Brāhmī's aspirates: Aramaic q for Brāhmī kh, Aramaic ṭ (Θ) for Brāhmī th (ʘ), etc. And just where Aramaic did not have a corresponding emphatic stop, p, Brāhmī seems to have doubled up for the corresponding aspirate: Brāhmī p and ph are graphically very similar, as if taken from the same source in Aramaic p. The first letter of the two alphabets also match: Brāhmī a, which resembled a reversed κ, looks a lot like Aramaic aleph, which resembled Hebrew א. The following table compares Brāhmī with Phoenician and Aramaic.

Possible derivation of Brāhmī from the Phoenician script

Greek	Α	Β	Γ	Δ		Ε	Υ	Ζ		Η	Θ		Ι	Κ		Λ	Μ	Ν		Ξ	Ο	Π		Ϻ	Ϙ		Ρ	Σ	Τ
Phoenician
Aramaic																								,
Brahmi						?				?											?
Bengali	অ	ব	গ	ধ	ঢ			দ	ড		থ	ঠ	য	ক	চ	ল	ম	ন	ণ	শ		প	ফ	স	খ	ছ	র	ষ	ত	ট
Devanagari	अ	ब	ग	ध	ढ		व	द	ड		थ	ठ	य	क	च	ल	म	न	ण	श		प	फ	स	ख	छ	र	ष	त	ट
Tamil	அ	ப	க	த	ட		வ	த	ட		த	ட	ய	க	ச	ல	ம	ந	ண			ப	ப		க	ச	ர		த	ட
IAST	a	ba	ga	dha	ḍha		va	da?	ḍa?		tha	ṭha	ya	ka	ca	la	ma	na	ṇa	śa*		pa	pha	sa*	kha	cha	ra	ṣa*	ta	ṭa

* Both Phoenician/Aramaic and Brahmi had three voiceless sibilants, but because the alphabetical ordering was lost, the correspondences among them are not clear.

Not accounted for are the six Brahmi consonants bh, gh, h, j, jh, ny, some of which could conceivably derive from the three Aramaic consonants with no obvious correspondence, he, heth, and ayin. (Brahmi ng was a later development.)^[2]:34

Indus hypothesis

The Indus hypothesis holds that the Brahmi script was derived from the script present during the final phases of the Indus valley period.^[20][21] One version of this hypothesis holds that the Brahmi script was created in the 5th century BCE, after a period of nearly a millennium of illiteracy, by derivation from various glyph forms that existed during the late Harappan period.^[20] These glyph forms are proposed to have survived the Indus collapse and are found on Mauryan Punch-marked coins^[22] from where they were derived into a writing system proper by the 6th-5th centuries BCE.

Evidence for a continuity between Indus and Brahmi can be seen in the graphic similarities between Brahmi and the late Harappan script, where the ten most common ligatures correspond with the form of one of the ten most common glyphs in Brahmi.^[23] There is also corresponding evidence of continuity in the use of numerals.^[24] Further support for this continuity comes from statistical analysis of the relationship carried out by Das.^[25]

South Indian epigraphy

Some common variants of Brahmic letters

The earliest likely contact of the Hindu Kush region with the Aramaic script occurred in the 6th century BCE with the expansion of the Achaemenid Empire under Darius the Great to the Indus valley. The Achaemenids spoke Old Persian but used Aramaic extensively for administrative functions, even though they had developed their own Old Persian cuneiform script in the early days of the Empire. Despite the evident example of Aramaic, short fragments from 4th century BCE contexts in Anuradhapura and the 3rd century BCE Ashoka edicts are the earliest dateable evidence for writing in Indo-Aryan languages. The Prakrit/Sanskrit word for writing itself, lipi, is borrowed from the Old Persian word dipi,^[26] with some alteration, possibly by analogy with native vocabulary. Dipi itself is thought to be an Elamite loanword.^[27]

Megasthenes, an ambassador to the Mauryan court in Northeastern India only a quarter century before Ashoka, noted explicitly that "…, and this notwithstanding the fact that they use unwritten laws. For they do not know the script, but they administer everything from memory".^[28] This has been variously and contentiously interpreted by many authors. Rocher almost entirely dismisses it via a chain of suppositions about the wording putatively used by Megasthenes' informant.^[29] Timmer considers it to reflect a misunderstanding "based upon the fact that Megasthenes rightly observed that the laws were unwritten and that oral tradition played such an important part in India."^[30] Scharfe though accepts Megasthenes' observation as being largely accurate and, from this and other evidence, concludes that no script was used or known in India, aside from the Persian-dominated Northwest, before around 300 BCE. Much like Timmer, Scharfe points out that Indian tradition "at every occasion stresses the orality of the cultural and literary heritage." ^[14] This statement by Megasthenes (as quoted by Strabo in the Geographica XV.i.53) is in the context of the kingdom of "Sandrakottos" (Chandragupta). Elsewhere in Strabo (Strab. XV.i.39), Megasthenes is said to have noted that it was a regular custom in India for the "philosopher" caste (presumably Brahmins) to submit written advice to kings, but this detail does not appear in parallel extracts of Megasthenes found in Arrian and Diodorus Siculus.^[31][32] Pāṇini as well noted the existence of scripts in his definitive work on Sanskrit grammar, the Ashtadhyayi, but the date of his work is uncertain and it is widely accepted that Pāṇini was born and lived in the Persian-controlled Northwest. Nearchus, a contemporary of Megasthenes, noted, a few decades prior, the use of cotton fabric for writing in North-western India. Indologists have variously speculated that this might have been Kharosthi or Aramaic, but Salomon regards the evidence from Greek sources to be inconclusive.^[2]:11 Strabo himself notes this inconsistency regarding reports on the use of writing in India (XV.i.67).

There have been claims that fragments of Brāhmī epigraphy found in Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka date as far back as the 5th or 6th century BCE. Recent claims for earlier dates include fragments of pottery from the trading town of Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka, which have been dated to the early 4th century BCE;^[33] from Bhattiprolu;^[34] and on pieces of pottery in Adichanallur, Tamil Nadu, which were associated with radiocarbon dates to the 6th century BCE.^[35] The claimed pre-Ashokan Bhattiprolu and Adichanallur inscriptions have been widely reported in the press, but do not appear to have been academically published so far. Salomon recognized the potential significance of the Anuradhapura inscriptions with respect to dating the origin of Brahmi but was cautious in accepting the early dates.^[2]:12–13 Coningham et al., in their thorough analysis of the Anuradhapura inscriptions, found that the language was Prakrit rather than Dravidian, and they were unwilling to draw any conclusions about the affinities of the script beyond its being Brahmi; no claim was made that it is Tamil Brahmi. The historical sequence of the specimens was interpreted to indicate an evolution in the level of stylistic refinement over several centuries, and they concluded that the Brahmi script may have arisen out of "mercantile involvement" and that the growth of trade networks in Sri Lanka was correlated with its first appearance in the area.^[33]

A date for Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions in Palani as early as the 7th century has also been claimed, but as of its 2011 announcement, Iravatham Mahadevan, "a leading authority on the Tamil-Brahmi and Indus scripts," and Dr. Y. Subbarayalu, Head of the Department of Indology at the French Institute of Pondicherry, cautioned that it was difficult to reach a conclusion on the basis of one single scientific dating.^[36]

Overall, evidence for pre-Mauryan Brahmi inscriptions remains inconclusive, restricted to pottery fragments with possible individual glyphs. The earliest complete inscriptions remain the 3rd-century-BCE Ashokan texts. Many early post-Ashokan remains show regional variation thought to have developed after a period of unity across India during the Ashokan period.

Ashoka inscriptions

Connections between Phoenician (4th column) and Brahmi (5th column). Note that 6th-to-4th-century BCE Aramaic (not shown) is in many cases intermediate in form between the two.

Brāhmī is clearly attested from the 3rd century BCE during the reign of Ashoka, who used the script for imperial edicts. It has commonly been supposed that the script was developed at around this time, both from the paucity of earlier dated examples, the alleged unreliability of those earlier dates, and from the geometric regularity of the script, which some have taken to be evidence that it had been recently invented.^[7]

Early regional variants

The earliest Ashokan inscriptions are found across India—apart from the Kharosthi-writing northwest—and are highly uniform. By the late third century BCE regional variants had developed, due to differences in writing materials and to the structures of the languages being written. For example, Tamil-Brahmi had a divergent system of vowel notation.

The earliest definite evidence of Brahmi script in South India comes from Bhattiprolu in Andhra Pradesh.^[37][38] The Bhattiprolu script was written on an urn containing Buddhist relics, apparently in Prakrit and old Telugu. Twenty-three letters have been identified. The letters ga and sa are similar to Mauryan Brahmi, while bha and da resemble those of modern Telugu script.

Sri Lankan inscriptions

In English, the most widely available set of reproductions of Brāhmī-script texts found in Sri Lanka is Epigraphia Zeylanica; in volume 1 (1976), many of the inscriptions are dated from the 3rd to 2nd century BC.^[39]

Unlike the edicts of Ashoka, however, the majority of the inscriptions from this early period in Sri Lanka are found above caves, are only a few words in length and "rarely say anything more than the name of the donor (who paid for the renovation of the cave, presumably); sometimes the donor's profession and village-of-origin are added, and sometimes the reader may be unable to guess if they are looking at the name of a person, profession or village, but can see that it is a name in any case (and not a philosophical statement)."^[40] The earliest widely accepted examples of writing in Brahmi are found in Anuradhapura, Sri lanka in the Prakrit language, ancestor of the Sinhalese language.^[33]

Characteristics

The Brāhmī symbol for /ka/, modified to represent different vowels

Variants of Brahmi over time

Brāhmī is usually written from left to right, as in the case of its descendants. However, a coin of the 4th century BCE has been found inscribed with Brāhmī running from right to left, as in Aramaic.

Brāhmī is an abugida, meaning that each letter represents a consonant, while vowels are written with obligatory diacritics called mātrās in Sanskrit, except when the vowels commence a word. When no vowel is written, the vowel /a/ is understood. This "default short a" is a characteristic shared with Kharosthī, though the treatment of vowels differs in other respects. Special conjunct consonants are used to write consonant clusters such as /pr/ or /rv/. In modern Devanagari the components of a conjunct are written left to right when possible (when the first consonant has a vertical stem that can be removed at the right), whereas in Brāhmī characters are joined vertically downwards.

Vowels following a consonant are inherent or written by diacritics, but initial vowels have dedicated letters. There are three vowels in Brāhmī: /a/, /i/, /u/; long vowels are derived from the letters for short vowels. However, there are only five vowel diacritics, as short /a/ is understood if no vowel is written.

It has been noted that the basic system of vowel marking common to Brāhmī and Kharosthī, in which every consonant is understood to be followed by a vowel, was well suited to Prakrit,^[41] but as Brāhmī was adapted to other languages, a special notation called the virāma was introduced to indicate the omission of the final vowel.

The collation order of Brāhmī is believed to have been the same as most of its descendant scripts, one based on Shiksha, the traditional Vedic theory of Sanskrit phonology. This groups the consonants into 5 phonetically-related groups of 5 called vargas. Trautmann attributes much of the popularity of the Brahmic script family to this "splendidly reasoned" system of arrangement.^[42]

Punctuation

Punctuation^[43] can be perceived as more of an exception than as a general rule in Asokan Brāhmī. For instance, distinct spaces in between the words appear frequently in the pillar edicts but not so much in others. ("Pillar edicts" refers to the texts that are inscribed on the stone pillars oftentimes with the intention of making them public.) The idea of writing each word separately was not consistently used.

In the early Brāhmī period, the existence of punctuation marks is not very well shown. Each letter has been written independently with some space between words and edicts occasionally.

In the middle period, the system seems to be in progress. The use of a dash and a curved horizontal line is found. A flower mark seems to mark the end, and a circular mark appears to indicate the full stop. There seem to be varieties of full stop.

In the late period, the system of interpunctuation marks gets more complicated. For instance, there are four different forms of vertically slanted double dashes that resemble "//" to mark the completion of the composition. Despite all the decorative signs that were available during the late period, the signs remained fairly simple in the inscriptions. One of the possible reasons may be that engraving is restricted while writing is not.

Four basic forms of the punctuation marks can be cited as:

• dash or horizontal bar
• vertical bar
• dot
• circle

Descendants

Gupta script on stone Kanheri Caves, one of the earliest descendants of Brahmi

Over the course of a millennium, Brāhmī developed into numerous regional scripts, commonly classified into a more rounded Southern India group and a more angular Northern India group. Over time, these regional scripts became associated with the local languages. A Northern Brahmi gave rise to the Gupta script during the Gupta Empire, sometimes also called "Late Brahmi" (used during the 5th century), which in turn diversified into a number of cursives during the Middle Ages, including Siddhaṃ alphabet (6th century), Śāradā script (9th century) and Devanagari (10th century).

Southern Brahmi gave rise to the Grantha alphabet (6th century), the Vatteluttu alphabet (8th century), and due to the contact of Hinduism with Southeast Asia during the early centuries CE, also gave rise to the Baybayin in the Philippines, the Javanese script in Indonesia, the Khmer alphabet in Cambodia, and the Mon script in Burma.

Also in the Brahmic family of scripts are several Central Asian scripts such as Tibetan and the one used to write the Saka language.

Several authors have suggested that the basic letters of hangul were modeled on the 'Phags-pa script of the Mongol Empire, itself a derivative of the Brahmic Tibetan alphabet (see origin of hangul).^[44][45]

The varga arrangement of Brāhmī was adopted as the modern order of Japanese kana, though the letters themselves are unrelated.^[46]

Unicode and digitization

Brāhmī was added to the Unicode Standard in October, 2010 with the release of version 6.0.

The Unicode block for Brāhmī is U+11000–U+1107F. It lies within Supplementary Multilingual Plane. As of August 2014 there are two non-commercially available fonts that support Brahmi, namely Noto Sans Brahmi commissioned by Google which covers all the characters,^[47] and Adinatha which only covers Tamil Brahmi.^[48]

See also

• Early Indian epigraphy
• Pre-Islamic scripts in Afghanistan
• Sankha Lipi

References

Further reading

• Kenneth R. Norman, The Development of Writing in India and its Effect upon the Pâli Canon, in Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde Südasiens (36), 1993
• Oscar von Hinüber, Der Beginn der Schrift und frühe Schriftlichkeit in Indien, Franz Steiner Verlag, 1990 (in German)
• Gérard Fussman, Les premiers systèmes d'écriture en Inde, in Annuaire du Collège de France 1988–1989 (in French)
• Siran Deraniyagala, The prehistory of Sri Lanka; an ecological perspective (revised ed.), Archaeological Survey Department of Sri Lanka, 1992.
• P.G. Patel, Pramod Pandey, Dilip Rajgor, The Indic Scripts: Palaeographic and Linguistic Perspectives. D.K. Printworld, 2007.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Brahmi script.

• On The Origin Of The Early Indian Scripts: A Review Article at the Wayback Machine (archived May 16, 2006) by Richard Salomon, University of Washington
• Brahmi project of the Indian Institute of Science
• Ancient Scripts – Brahmi
• Buddhist Text in Brahmi Script
• Windows Indic Script Support