On the Origin of the Indian Brahma Alphabet c3.5

c3.5

While the new facts, contained in these recent contributions, have been duly utilised, it has not been possible to pay much attention to M. J. Halévy’s two controversial papers in the Revue Sémitique of 1895, pp. 223 ff., 372 ff., beyond omitting in note 1 on p. 52 his derivation of the Brāhma numeral symbol for 8 (supposed to contain the first two letters of *aṣṭa*), from the Kharoṣṭhī *kha*, which, as he now tells us, is a misprint for *aś* (a non-existing and impossible ligature¹ originally invented by Dr. I. Taylor), and beyond adding a protest against the derivation of the circular cipher, which belongs not to the ancient Brāhma system of numeral symbols but to the later decimal notation, from the Kharoṣṭhī *da*.²