Elements of South-Indian Palæography, from the Fourth to the Seventeenth Century A.D. c4.28

c4.28

But Pāṇini's sūtras show that writing was known in his time, and many expressions render it impossible to doubt that he used writing, and that to express minute details³); and one of his sūtras (vi., 3, 115) shows that the figures for eight and five were then used for marking cattle. That writing must soon have come into general use in India for literary purposes cannot be doubted, for without it, it is impossible that the systematic *prose* treatises which form so large a share of the Sanskrit literature, could ever have been composed⁴).