Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c25.s3.33

c25.s3.33

Gift Siromoney and Michael Lockwood⁶ claim that "the Brāhmī script was invented at one stroke—possibly by one individual"; they reject "both the theory that it was evolved from the Indus script and also the theory that it was borrowed and developed from some non-Indian script". The point of departure for their demonstration is the pair of symbols found at the end of two Tamil-Brāhmī inscriptions at Kongarpuliyankulam.⁷ They proceed to normalise the symbols into "basic geometric patterns" consisting of a square, a circle, a cross and a vertical line. From segments of these components, they "extract" all the letters of the Brāhmī script.⁸ As Gelb points out, signs of the linear scripts are likely to show some resemblance to one another as these are based in practice on a few simple forms of straight lines, triangles, squares and circles which can be easily remembered.⁹