On the Origin of the Indian Brahma Alphabet c6.30

c6.30

very few allusions to the use of letters are contained in the literary works which date from the fourth century B. C. The answer to this statement is contained in the second part of this paper, and it need only be pointed out that Dr. Burnell could not know of the passages mentioning private and official documents, as the works, in which they occur, had not been published in 1878. His second and accessory argument is drawn from internal evidence furnished by the Edicts. He says, El. South Indian Palaeography, p. 2, "The inscriptions of Aśoka are also in themselves proofs that writing was about 250 B. C. a recent practice; for they present irregularities of every kind," and in the note to the passage, he quotes as instances, conflicting spellings like *āñapitaṃ* (correctly *ānāpitaṃ*) and *ānāpitaṃ*, *dasaṇa* and *dasaṇa* (from the Girnār version), the irregular insertion of nasals before consonants (which, as he admits, may be due to the negligence of the masons) and the constant neglect of the reduplication of consonants *e. g.* in *piyasa* for *piyassa*, *ārabhisante* (read *ārabhisare*) for *ārabbhissare* and so forth. These facts are indisputable, and other similar ones like the irregular employment of the signs for sibilants in Kālsī, Bairāt II and Siddāpur and the constant or nearly constant use of short *i* and *u* for long *ī* and *ū* in Kālsī, Bairāt and Rūpnāth may be added. But they do not prove the proposition, in support of which Dr. Burnell adduces them. The numerous double and even treble forms of the same words, which occur in one and the same version are not graphic. Some are, as the analogies in the ancient literary Prakrits show, real variants which occurred in one and the same dialect, and some are due to slips in the translation of the Māgadhī originals of the Edicts into the Western and Northwestern dialects. The irregular use of the Anusvāra before consonants may also be ascribed partly to the same cause, since the Pali too occasionally omits a nasal and then doubles the following consonant. In other cases it may be due to the carelessness of Aśoka's clerks, who treated their Vernaculars exactly as a modern Karkun treats his. Everybody who has had any experience of Indian office work, must know that the *Sheras* or official papers, prepared by the clerks of the older generation, who had received their elementary instruction in the indigenous schools and had afterwards been trained in the offices, show an extreme irregularity in the use of the Anusvāras, of the short and long *i* and *u*, of the three signs for sibilants and of the reduplication of consonants. During my service as Educational Inspector I have seen a great many, sometimes important, documents from British Government offices and from those of native princes, which in their spelling were quite as bad as, and even worse than, Aśoka's Edicts, and I do not recollect that any papers, except those sent by carefully trained schoolmasters, were quite exact. One cause of this state of things was the wretched instruction in the indigenous schools, [43] from the right to the left.¹ The letters agree exactly with Aśoka's and the *dha* has the position required for the writing from the left to the right. It dates, therefore, from a period during which the Brāhma characters were written in both directions. This period is probably not very far distant from the middle of the third century B. C., as the Edicts still show single letters, which belong to the writing from the right to the left, viz., the *dha*, given in the first Comparative Table No 4, Col. V, a, the *O*, ibidem, No 6, Col. VI, f, and the *ta*, ibidem, No 22, Col. V, l. The coin may, therefore, be somewhat younger than Sir A. Cunningham thinks, who assigns it to 400 B. C. The great antiquity of its find-spot, the town of Eraṇ, is attested by an inscription on the Sānchi Stūpa, where it occurs as *Erakina*.