On the Origin of the Indian Brahma Alphabet c3.15

c3.15

(1) The assumption that all the Aśoka inscriptions date from B. C. 221, which is the basis of M. Halévy’s contention that no inscription in Aśoka characters can be older than B. C. 221, and which is another version of his statement on p. 12, declaring the Aśoka edicts to have been incised about (*vers*) 221, is a sad blunder which a writer on Indian palaeography ought not to make. And it is the more unpardonable, as Professor Max Müller, whose Hibbert Lectures, translated by M. J. Darmesteter, M. Halévy quotes (p. 12, note 1) as his authority, explicitly gives B. C. 221 only as the date of the so-called three New Edicts of Sahasrām, Rūpnāth and Bairāt, following my calculations, and does not touch the question of the dates of the other numerous Aśoka inscriptions.