On the Origin of the Indian Brahma Alphabet c6.32

c6.32

A still more important palaeographic witness for the antiquity of the Brāhma alphabet is the variety, found in the inscriptions on the Bhaṭṭiprolu relic caskets, the value of which, I am sorry to say, I have somewhat underestimated in the introductory remarks to my edition in the Epigraphia Indica, Vol. II, p. 323 ff. Though the article has been published only in 1894, it was written more than two years earlier, before I had begun to ing the details, the necessity for which will become more fully apparent in the next part of this paper, naturally forces me to modify the general proposition that the Bhaṭṭiprolu alphabet does not teach us much regarding the history of the Brāhma [45] writing and regarding the conversion of the Semitic letters into Indian characters. It certainly furnishes us with valuable intermediate forms for four radical signs, *c*, *j*, *l* and *ṣ*, which latter appears to be the parent of the ordinary Brāhma *ṣa* and *sa*, and with one entirely independent derivative sign *gh*. Its separation from the ordinary Brāhma alphabet must fall not only before the third century B. C., but also before the time, when the Eraṇ coin was struck, and cannot have happened at a later period than the fifth century B. C., though it may fall much earlier.