Elements of South-Indian Palæography, from the Fourth to the Seventeenth Century A.D. c6.25

c6.25

The ultimate Phœnician origin of the Indian alphabets being, as I have already shown¹), admitted on grounds that, except new discoveries of an unexpected kind be made, are tolerably conclusive; it is natural (though not absolutely necessary), to look to a similar foreign source for the elements of the Indian systems of notation. The Phœnician inscriptions supply ample evidence that such a system was in use long before the Indian alphabets could have been borrowed, for that must have happened in comparatively late times, and they also supply proof that the source of this system was that used in Egypt²). The Egyptian hieroglyphic system, in fact, can hardly be said to differ from the Phœnician.