Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c21.s14.1

c21.s14.1

I became deeply interested in exploring the orthographic systems in Tamil-Brāhmī and their interrelation with those of the Brāhmī and Bhattiprolu scripts. As mentioned above, I formulated a tentative model in the *Corpus 1966*. After I became aware of the presence of the *puḷḷi* in the Tamil-Brāhmī inscriptions, and taking into account constructive criticisms by scholars, I modified the model in the paper presented at the Sixth International Conference Seminar of Tamil Studies held at Kuala Lumpur in 1987.⁶ The results of these studies on the orthographic systems in the Tamil-Brāhmī script have been further updated in Chapter 6 in this volume.⁷