Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c25.s19.t1.1

c25.s19.t1.1

Burnell thought that Vaṭṭeḻuttu was not related to the Asokan alphabet and must have developed independently from Phoenician or Aramaic scripts.¹ Bühler described Vaṭṭeḻuttu as a 'cursive' form of the Tamil script, "which bears the same relation to the Tamil as the modern northern alphabets of the clerks and merchants to their originals".² These theories proposed in the late 19th century in the early days of South Indian epigraphical studies have become obsolete after the discovery and decipherment of the Tamil-Brāhmī and Early Vaṭṭeḻuttu inscriptions. Gopinatha Rao³ and Subramanian⁴ were able to demonstrate that both Vaṭṭeḻuttu and Tamil scripts originated from Brāhmī, but had separate lines of evolution. Sivaramamurti published palaeographic charts tracing the origin of each letter of the Vaṭṭeḻuttu and Tamil scripts from the corresponding letter in the Tamil cave inscriptions, but admitted the existence of a millennium-long gap between the cave inscriptions and the medieval Tamil inscriptions on which his charts are based.⁵ In so far as the Vaṭṭeḻuttu script is concerned, this enormous gap has now been bridged by the more recent discoveries noticed below.