Indian Palaeography c18.s2: Area

Indian Palaeography c18.s2

Language: English

Area

The area within which we can prove Kharoshṭhī to have been regularly used belongs to the north-west. The easternmost limit is, in the Panjāb, at Māṇikiāla. There are two inscriptions from Kangra, where Kharoshṭhī is used in addition to Brāhmī, and there is another record from Karnāl, which shows that the alphabet was known farther to the east, and foreign conquerors from the north-west used it in a well-known inscription from Mathurā on the Jamnā, where Brāhmī was the common alphabet, also in inscriptions and coins. We even possess a Kharoṣṭhī record from Patna. But the plaque on which it is written has evidently been left there by a person who came from north-west. We do not know exactly how far the use of Kharoṣṭhī extended towards the west. Coins with Kharoṣṭhī legends have been found in Seistan and Kandahār, but the westernmost Kharoṣṭhī inscriptions which have been found are from Khawat in Afghanistan and, side by side with Brāhmī records, from the Thal valley in Baluchistan. And even here we have every reason for assuming that the alphabet was brought and used by immigrants from the east. For it is little suited for the requirements of Iranian languages, and we have nothing to show that the dialect in which most Kharoṣṭhī records are written was ever spoken as a vernacular much farther east than Jalālābād. The northernmost Kharoṣṭhī records come from Tīrath in Swāt and Khalatse in Ladakh, and in the south we have some fragments from Mohenjodaro in the Lārkāna district and Kharoṣṭhī legends on the coins of some of the oldest of the Western Kshatrapas. But such stray instances do not prove anything more for the proper Kharoṣṭhī area than the Kharoṣṭhī word Lipikareṇa in the Siddhāpur edicts of Aśoka. The Kharoṣṭhī area proper may be defined as extending from about 69° to 73° 30′ E. and from the Hindu Kush to about 33° N., and there can be little doubt that its place of origin was Gandhāra, perhaps more especially Taxila.¹

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¹ Konow, *C.I.I.* vol. ii, pp. xiii–xiv.

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To this area of the Kharoṣṭhī inscriptions must now be added Chinese Turkestan, from the discovery there of a Prakrit *Dhammapada* in 1892 by the French traveller, Dutreuil de Rhins, and later of numerous Kharoṣṭhī documents by Sir Aurel Stein. This limited area within which Kharoṣṭhī was used helped in maintaining the unitary style of this writing, and there was hardly any chance for its branching out into provincial schools, as was the case with the Brāhmī.

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*Period*

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The earliest² inscriptions in Kharoṣṭhī are those of Aśoka (middle of the third century B.C.) found at Mansehra and Shahbazgarhi, and the latest are those known in the inscriptions of the later Kushāṇas (third to fourth century A.D.). A few private records may have been written slightly later, but already Brāhmī was adopted by the Indianized rulers in this region. In Chinese Turkestan Kharoshṭhī was kept up by the local people for some time more. But in India, when the Hūṇas appear in the fifth century A.D., no trace of Kharoshṭhī is seen.

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² For the alleged early coins see above, pp. 59–61.

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*Nature*

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As Bühler has shown, the Kharoshṭhī script has been found (i) in stone inscriptions, (2) on metal plates and vases, (3) on coins, (4) on cameos, and (5) on a small piece of birch-bark from a stūpa in Afghanistan and on the *bhūrja* MS. of the *Dhammapada* from Khotan.¹ To this list must be added the documents on wood, leather or paper discovered by Stein in Chinese Turkestan. In all these writings Kharoshṭhī maintains its unified character. Hardly any evolution is seen in the forms of the letters. The main variation is in the manner in which a given form is reproduced on a material, the change in the latter affecting the form. The particular manner followed in a period or on one material became a convention. This convention did not develop into different schools of writing as it was controlled by a common technical process. It is the recognition of the conventionalized strokes, or the way of writing followed in the different materials, that roughly enables us to place the different inscriptions in chronological order. The invention of the diacritic strokes for new sounds is most important in Kharoshṭhī. As this script has been used to express sounds needed in different languages, it was necessary to devise ways by which a given alphabet might be adopted to the particular need. But despite these additional strokes the main forms of the nucleus letters hardly show any evolution. The Kharoshṭhī script has only one type, but it has complete power to express any sound of Sanskrit or foreign origin. The view propounded by Bühler² that it was a popular writing as opposed to the Brāhmī, which he thought to be literary, has been rightly corrected by Rapson³ on the evidence of the Niya documents, and he has conclusively shown that Kharoshṭhī could be used for writing correct Sanskrit. But the example of classical Sanskrit quoted by him is limited to only four verses. On the other hand, some form of the local Prakrit is the chief medium through which Kharoshṭhī is now known, and it seems that it was originally created to express this language. For while the nucleus letters and even the medial short vowels have separate signs for themselves, the additional letters are formed by a common diacritic stroke (an oblique stroke added to the foot of the vertical on the right), and a uniform procedure of adding a sloping stroke at the right bottom of the letters is adopted for the long vowels. This regularity suggests a later adaptation.

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¹ *Indian Palaeography*, Eng. tr., p. 18.

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² Ibid., p. 19.

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³ *Kharoshṭhī Inscriptions*, pt. iii, p. 295.

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*Technique*

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The Kharoshṭhī is a pen style of writing, in which one type of pen remained in use throughout. The manner of its use is easily detected. In the Aśokan inscriptions it leaves behind a foot-mark in the form of an upward slant at the lower end of the verticals on the left. This foot-mark must be attributed to the style of the writer rather than to the engraver, as is proved by its presence in the hand-written documents from Chinese Turkestan (Pl. XXIII. 13). When it is not found on stone or metal, it is partly due to the engraver’s negligence¹ and partly to another style of writing seen in the documents. In this second style the verticals gradually thin out into curves, as is natural to a pen. It is these curves which predominate in the inscriptions of the Kushāṇa period. In such examples the medial *u* assumes the form of a loop. This loop in stone engraving sometimes becomes a triangle. In the ink style of writing seen in some potsherds from Baluchistan² and in the documents from Chinese Turkestan the tendency is to draw the lines and the additional strokes with one sweep of the hand. It is this process which has resulted in the cursive forms of some letters, especially *sa*. However, the writer’s hand may not be faithfully copied by the engraver or the metal worker, and sometimes the latter’s technique or convention produces a different effect; e.g. on metal plates and vases the letters are formed by rows of dots (not shown in our plate), in steatite vases the letters are scratched with a stylus, and in the coins and medals many other superfluous lines or dots are usually seen in the forms of *ma*, *ha*, and *ja*, and rarely in *ga*, *da*, *na*, and *sa*. Percy Gardner¹ took these lines and dots for lengthened vowels, and hence read *māhāraja* for *maharaja*, and *menadrāsa* for *menaṁdrasa*.²

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¹ It must, however, be pointed out that this foot-mark in the Aśokan inscriptions is generally seen with the initial *a* (optionally) and with those consonants which have the medial *a* implicit in them. From this factual observation some (including Rapson) have taken this slant to stand for medial *ā*. But in view of the evidence from the hand-written documents this is hardly justified (see *Kharoshṭhī Inscriptions*, pt. iii, p. 299). Secondly, an altogether different stroke is used for lengthening the vowels in these documents. If this slant was adopted in the Aśokan inscriptions, it is difficult to understand why it was given up.