Elements of South-Indian Palæography, from the Fourth to the Seventeenth Century A.D. c5.s2.t3.1

c5.s2.t3.1

The development of the early stages of the Grantha character is very difficult to trace, for the reason that the N. Indian civilization, when it got as far down in the peninsula as the Tamiḷ country, found there a people already in possession of the art of writing, and apparently a cultivated language[^1). Thus Sanskrit did not regulate the Tamiḷ phonetic system, nor did it become more to the people than a foreign learned language; it thus remained almost exclusively in the knowledge of the Brahmans, and the Grantha alphabet is nothing more than the character the Tamiḷ Brahmans used and still use, for writing their sacred books in a dead language. As there are no old MSS. written in this character, the records we possess of its early stages are most imperfect, and consist chiefly of Sanskrit words which casually occur in Tamiḷ inscriptions. I am aware of the existence of only a few Sanskrit inscriptions in the Grantha character more than three centuries old, and these are not dated, except one of 1383.