Indian Palaeography c18.s2.2

c18.s2.2

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