Indian Palaeography from about B.C. 350 to about A.D. 1300 c7.s9.5

c7.s9.5

The full recognition of the actual condition of the Indian writing is obscured also by the fact that the inscriptions of the earliest period, with two exceptions, are either in Prākrit or in a mixed language (Gāthā dialect), and that the originals, from which they were transferred to stone or copper, were drafted by clerks and monks who possessed little or no education. In [31] writing Prākrit these persons adopted nearly throughout — (in writing the mixed dialect less constantly) — the practically convenient popular orthography, in which the notation of long vowels, especially of *ī* and *ū*, and of the Anusvāra, is occasionally neglected as a matter of small importance, and in which double consonants are mostly represented by single ones, non-aspirates are omitted before aspirates, and the Anusvāra is put for all vowelless medial nasals.⁴ This mode of spelling continues in the Prākrit inscriptions with great constancy until the second century A. D. The constant doubling of the consonants appears first in a Pāli inscription of *Hāritīputta Sātakaṇṇi*, king of Banavāsī, which has been recently found by L. RICE.⁵ The longer known inscription of the same prince (IA. 14, 331) does not show it. Besides, we find in some other, partly much older, Prākrit documents, faint traces of the phonetical and grammatical spelling of the Paṇḍits. Thus, the Aśoka edicts of Shāhbāzgarhī offer some instances of *mma* (see above, § 9, B, 4), the Nāsik inscriptions Nos. 14, 15, and Kuḍā No. 5, have the word *siddha*, and Kaṇheri No. 14 *āyyakena*.⁶ Such deviations from the rule indicate that the writers had learned a little Sanskrit, which fact is proved also for the writer who drafted the Kālsī edicts by the, for the Pāli absurd, form *baṃhmane* for *baṃbhane* (Kālsī edict XIII, l. 39).