Elements of South-Indian Palæography, from the Fourth to the Seventeenth Century A.D. c4.13

c4.13

Thus, before the conquests of Alexander, the natives of India had ample opportunities to learn the art of writing from others, or to invent a system for themselves, and thus it must be held that they copied, for there has not been found as yet the least trace of the invention and development of an independent *Indian* alphabet[^5), while of the two characters in which the inscriptions of Açoka were written, the northern has been conclusively identified (by Mr. E. Thomas) with an Aramaic original, and a number of letters in the Southern alphabet point clearly to a similar source. I shall also show, further on, that there is a third