Indian Palaeography from about B.C. 350 to about A.D. 1300 c6.s3.22

c6.s3.22

This estimate carries us back to the period for which the Ceylonese canon proves the general use of writing in India, without however giving the name of the current alphabet. It seems therefore natural to conjecture that the alphabet known to the earliest Buddhist authors was a form of the Brāhmī; and there are some further facts which favour this view. Firstly, recent discoveries have made it evident that the Brāhmī has been commonly used since the earliest times even in North-Western India, and that it was indeed the real national script of all Hindus.⁵ In the ruins of Taxila, the modern Shāh-Derī in the Pañjāb, coins have been found which are struck according to the old Indian standard, and some of which bear inscriptions in Kharoṣṭhī, while the majority show legends in the oldest type of the Brāhmī, sometimes together with transcripts in Kharosthī.¹ These coins are certainly not later than the third century B. C. Perhaps they even date, as CUNNINGHAM thinks, from a much earlier time about B. C. 400. Some of them have been struck by *nejamā* or guilds, those of the *Dojaka* or *Dujaka*, of the *Tālimata* and of the *Atakatakā* (?), and one with the inscription *Vatasvaka* probably was issued by a section of the tribe of the *Aśvakas* (*Assakenoi*), named after the *vaṭa*-tree, the Ficus religiosa. These finds decidedly establish the popular use of the Brāhmī in the Pañjāb, side by side with the Kharosthī, at least for the third century B. C. Mr. RAPSON'S discovery of Persian *sigloi* with letters in Kharosthī and in Brāhmī proves that both alphabets were used together *much earlier*.² For, in all probability these *sigloi* were current during the rule of the Akhaemenians over North-Western India, or before B. C. 331.