On the Origin of the Indian Brahma Alphabet c3.1

c3.1

As the few separate copies of the Indian Studies No. III, struck off in 1895, were sold very soon and rather numerous requests for additional ones were addressed both to me and to the bookseller of the Imperial Academy, Messrs. Carl Gerold's Sohn, I asked the Academy for permission to issue a second edition, which Mr. Karl J. Trübner had consented to publish. My petition was readily granted. In addition Messrs. von Hölder, the publishers of the Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, kindly allowed me to reprint my article on the origin of the Kharoṣṭhī, which had appeared in vol. IX of that Journal and is now given in Appendix I. To these two sections I have added, in Appendix II, a brief review of the arguments for Dr. Burnell's hypothesis, which derives the so-called letter-numerals or numerical symbols of the Brāhma alphabet from the ancient Egyptian numeral signs, together with a third comparative table, in order to include in this volume all those points, which require fuller discussion, and in order to make it a serviceable companion to the palaeography of the Grundriss. The chapters on the Brāhmī and the Kharoṣṭhī have been throughout revised and the first has been changed most. A new comparative table of the Semitic and Brāhma signs,¹ the same as has been used for the Grundriss, has been given. The Additional Note at the end has been omitted, as, since the appearance of M. Sylvain Lévi's article¹ on the Turkish kingdom of Northwestern India, it is no longer required, and a number of other alterations and additions has been made in accordance with the results of further researches.