Indian Palaeography from about B.C. 350 to about A.D. 1300 c6.s3.16

c6.s3.16

The existence of so many local varieties, and of so very numerous cursive forms, proves in any case that writing had had a long history in Aśoka's time, and that the alphabet was then in a state of transition. The use of the cursive forms together with archaic ones may possibly be explained by the assumption that several, partly more archaic and partly more advanced, alphabets were simultaneously used during the third century B. C., and that the writers, intending or ordered to use lapidary forms, through negligence mixed them with the more familiar cursive letters, as has also happened not rarely in later inscriptions. It is possible to adduce in favour of this view the above-mentioned tradition of the Dṛṣṭivāda, according to which a larger number of alphabets was in use about B. C. 300. The conjecture would become a certainty, if it could be shown that the word *seto*, "the white (elephant)," which has been added to Dhauli edict VI. in order to explain the sculpture above the middle column, was incised at the same time as the preceding edicts. The two characters of *seto* show the types of the Kuṣana and Gupta inscriptions.¹ Though it is difficult to understand that, in later times, anybody should have cared to add the explanation of the relief, keeping exactly the line of the edict, the possibility of the assumption that this was actually done, is not altogether excluded.