On the Origin of the Indian Brahma Alphabet c6.18

c6.18

¹ As I have stated already in Dr. Burgess’ Arch. Surv. Rep. W. I., Vol. IV, p. 79 f. and in the Ind. Ant., Vol. XII, 190, the clerks who prepared the fair copies of the inscriptions, not the masons or coppersmiths who engraved them, are the men who influenced the formation of the letters. How the masons worked, may be seen from two passages of the Kālsī version. In the twelfth Edict, l. 31 six letters have been scored out and the corrections have been written above the line. The letters in the upper row are as large as those in the lower and the distance between lines 30 and 31 becomes from the beginning of the corrected passage twice as great as it was before. It is evident that the mistake and its correction occurred in the MS. given to the mason. If they were due to the latter, the line would run on straighter and the letters of the correction would be smaller. Again in the fourteenth Edict l. 20 the syllables *ṭite* of the word *ghaṭite* are corrections, one standing above the line and the other below it. But the distance between *gha* and the first letter of the following word, *ma*, is twice as great as those intervening between the other letters of the line. Here it is again certain that the MS. had the mistake and the correction. If the mason had skipped the two signs and added them afterwards, the *gha* would not stand further off from *ma* than from its predecessor. I think that these two instances are sufficient to prove that Aśoka's masons copied quite mechanically. It seems, therefore, impossible to attribute to them any other influence on the shape of the letters than such as may be caused by a slip of the chisel or by their accidentally overlooking a stroke in the MS. before them.