On the Origin of the Indian Brahma Alphabet c3.9

c3.9

The quality of their scholarship and method is perhaps best illustrated by the results of the ‘*examen sérieux*’ of the age of the Jātakas represented on the Stūpas of Sānchi and Bharahut,³ which, as it would lose in effect by curtailment, I translate in full:— “These monuments offer inscriptions in Aśoka characters; these insrs consequently cannot be earlier than B. C. 221, because otherwise the writing would run from the right to the left, as in the legend of the Eran coin. How far can the lower limit of their date go? Let us not put it too close to the relic caskets of Bhaṭṭiprolu, which are at least fifty years later, and which show already some altered forms, and let us put between the latter and the Stūpas an interval of twenty years. The inscriptions of Sanchi and Bharahut date therefore from about 191, *i. e.*, one hundred and thirty four years later than the introduction of writing (*quaere, of the Brāhma letters?*) into India. It is in this interval that the composition (*sic*) must necessarily be placed, in the middle of the Greek epoch and in no way in the Persian period. Very luckily for us, the Katahaka-jataka (*sic*) mentions the writing-board, *phalaka*, and the texts of the Stūpas the canonical term *piṭaka* “a box for tablets of card-board or wood”, in which the Jainas usually keep their MSS.,¹ with its derivative *peṭaki* “he who knows the Piṭaka or Piṭakas”, where naturally not the box, but the tablets or leaves, contained in it, are meant. These are real revelations; for the terms *phalaka* and *piṭaka*, which have no etymology in Sanskrit,² are nothing but the Greek words πλαξ (-κός) and πιττάκιον;³ the identity of sound corresponds to the identity of meaning. The Jatakas (*sic*) carry on their forehead the date of their birth, to wit, the century which follows the conquest of Alexander.”’