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Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c25.s6: 5.6 Tamil-Brāhmī and other Brāhmī variants

Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c25.s6

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5.6 Tamil-Brāhmī and other Brāhmī variants

5.6.1 Mauryan Brāhmī

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An overall palaeographic comparison of the earliest known forms of the common letters between Brāhmī and Tamil-Brāhmī (Charts 1 and 2) leads to the broad judgement that the time of borrowing and adaptation from Brāhmī to Tamil-Brāhmī cannot be later than the end of the Mauryan Age. In general, the Early Tamil-Brāhmī letters share the primitive appearance and the tall and angular forms of the Asokan Brāhmī. (Compare, for example, the Brahmagiri Rock Edict of Asoka in Fig. 5.¹ with the Mangulam grants of Neṭuñceḻiyaṉ in Figs. 8.1 & 8.².) The squarish letters with head-marks ('serifs') of the Northern as well as the Southern Brāhmī scripts of the post-Mauryan era are too evolved to have formed the prototypes for the earliest Tamil-Brāhmī forms.

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¹ The *puḷḷi* may also be regarded as a 'medial vowel sign' as it functions in effect as a 'minus vowel marker' removing the 'inherent' *-a* from consonant characters and reducing the length of the vowels *ē* and *ō*. See section 5.14 on the palaeographic aspects and sections 6.8 & 6.9 on the orthographic aspects of the *puḷḷi*.

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² The aspirate *dh* occurs only in the loanword *dhammam*/*dhamam* in two of the earliest inscriptions (Nos. *1 & 2*) at Mangulam. The sibilant *s* occurs 12 times, all in the Early Period, out of which 5 occurrences are also from the inscriptions (Nos. *1-3*) at Mangulam. No other non-Tamil letter occurs in the inscriptions included in the Corpus. Earlier investigators have occasionally misread *ḷ* as *ṭh* (as in Nos. *34 & 49*) or as *ś* (as in No. 7).

5.6.2 Southern Brāhmī

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There were close cultural, religious and commercial contacts between the Deccan and the Tamil country from the earliest times. However, Southern Brāhmī and Tamil-Brāhmī, both arising from the Mauryan Brāhmī script at about the same time, appear to have evolved independently of each other as shown by the characteristically different forms of letters with common sounds. The Early Tamil-Brāhmī inscriptions (ca. 2nd century B.C.-1st century A.D.) included in the present Corpus do not have any forms influenced by Southern Brāhmī.

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Influence of Southern Brāhmī is seen for the first time in the Tamil-Brāhmī inscriptions of the Late Period (ca. 2nd-4th centuries A.D.) in the northern and western districts adjoining the Andhra-Karnataka regions. This influence is marginal also in the sense that the few Southern Brāhmī forms seen in these inscriptions do not enter the mainstream of evolution of Tamil-Brāhmī into Vaṭṭeḻuttu. The Southern Brāhmī forms occurring in the Late Tamil-Brāhmī inscriptions are noticed in the following discussion on palaeographic evolution of Tamil-Brāhmī and illustrated in the accompanying charts.

5.6.3 The Bhattiprolu script

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In 1892 Alexander Rea discovered three relic stone caskets (Fig. 5.2) from a Buddhist stupa at Bhattiprolu, a village in the Krishna District of Andhra Pradesh.¹ Nine Prakrit inscriptions are engraved on the caskets in a unique local variant of the Brāhmī script. Bühler edited the inscriptions in a classic paper elucidating with rare insight their remarkable palaeographic and orthographic 'peculiarities' not known in the Mauryan Brāhmī script.²

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¹ For the discovery of the Bhattiprolu Caskets, see J. Burgess, 1894: *EI*. II, Preface, pp. ix-xiii.

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² G. Bühler 1894 b: pp. 323-329.

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(a) Special palaeographic features

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Most of the letters of the casket inscriptions resemble those of Mauryan Brāhmī. There are, however, six exceptional forms (*gh*, *c*, *j*, *m*, *l* and *sh*) and one additional letter (*ḷ*) not found in Mauryan Brāhmī. None of these forms is found in Tamil-Brāhmī with the exception of *c* with the tail,³ in which case the resemblance may be merely fortuitous.

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³ Corpus: Nos. *55*, *105*.

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(b) Special orthographic features

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While the special palaeographic features of the Bhattiprolu script have hardly any bearing on the study of Tamil-Brāhmī, the position is entirely different when one considers the special orthographic features of the former script in respect of medial vowel notations. The Bhattiprolu script, which remained as an isolated epigraphical curio until the discovery of the Tamil-Brāhmī inscriptions, has turned out to be the Rosetta Stone for the eventual decipherment of the Tamil-Brāhmī script. As we shall see in Chapter 6, it is the comparison of the orthographic features that provides the decisive evidence that the Bhattiprolu script must be later than the earliest phase of the Tamil-Brāhmī script.⁴

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⁴ See section 6.10 and Fig. 6.3.

5.6.4 Sinhala-Brāhmī

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Early Sinhala-Brāhmī has markedly close palaeographic similarities with Mauryan Brāhmī on the one hand, and with Tamil-Brāhmī on the other.¹ Late Sinhala-Brāhmī which is strongly influenced by the contemporary Southern Brāhmī script, most probably due to close contacts with the Buddhist establishments in Andhra, is too divergent from Tamil-Brāhmī of the same period for any useful comparison.²

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¹ A. Velu Pillai 1980: pp. 38-54; 1981: pp. I-111 to I-120.

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² S. Paranavitana (1970: p. xxii) notes the similarities between the script of the later cave inscriptions in Sri Lanka and that of Andhra, but attributes the changes to local development.

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Palaeographic comparison of the earliest forms of the common letters indicates that Sinhala-Brāhmī, like Tamil-Brāhmī, is directly derived from Mauryan Brāhmī before the end of the Mauryan Age.³ In the case of Sinhala-Brāhmī, the chronology is confirmed by the dating of a few royal inscriptions.⁴ Thus the close palaeographic similarities between the common letters of Early Sinhala-Brāhmī and Early Tamil-Brāhmī provide further confirmation for dating the commencement of the latter script also from about the same time (ca. 200 b.c.).

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³ Cf. palaeographic charts in S. Paranavitana 1970: Pl. facing p. xvi and in S. Karunaratne. 1984: Figs. 1-35.

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⁴ S. Paranavitana (1970:p. xvii) dates the earliest cave inscriptions in Sri Lanka from the last quarter of the 3rd century b.c. S. Karunaratne (1984:pp. 2-5) places the upper limit of the earliest dated inscriptions at the beginning of the 2nd century b.c. A.H. Dani (1963) has not, even in the revised Indian edition (1986), noticed these works. Dani's dating of the earliest cave inscriptions of Sri Lanka to 'about the beginning of the first century a.d.' (ibid. p. 219) is hardly justified; his dating does not explain wherefrom Sri Lanka could have obtained the Mauryan Brāhmī forms in the 1st century a.d. when they were no longer current.

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While Tamil-Brāhmī has been adapted to suit the requirements of the Tamil phonetic system, Sinhala-Brāhmī has been adapted to the phonology of Sinhala-Prakrit, which is markedly different from that of the Indian Prakrits. While Tamil-Brāhmī did away with voiced consonants, aspirates, sibilants, the *anusvāra* and the *visarga*, Early Sinhala-Brāhmī dropped long vowels, aspirates, the sibilants *śh* and *s*, the *anusvāra* and the *visarga*, as these sounds did not exist in the language of the early cave inscriptions. While Tamil-Brāhmī added four new letters viz., *l*, *l*, *r* and *n* by modifying the Brāhmī letters with the nearest phonetic values, Early Sinhala-Brāhmī utilised the Brāhmī letter *jh* (an aspirate not present in Early Sinhala-Prakrit) in the place of *j* to represent some allied sound for which no letter was available in Brāhmī.

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One of the most interesting aspects of Early Sinhala-Brāhmī is the complete absence of ligaturing of consonants. In this respect, Sinhala-Brāhmī is unique among the Prakrit-based variants of Brāhmī. The avoidance of ligaturing of consonants is facilitated in Early Sinhala-Brāhmī by the phonological processes of assimilation and epenthesis which are more thoroughgoing in this language than in Indian Prakrits, most probably due to the substratum influence of Tamil. This would explain how the two scripts, one for a Middle Indo-Aryan and the other for a Dravidian language, were able to avoid ligatures, a prominent feature in all other regional scripts.

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Other palaeographic features shared by the two scripts are the common forms of the letters **a**, *ī* (read as *i* in Early Sinhala-Brāhmī) *m* and *ḷ*.¹ It is noteworthy that all these forms are replaced in Late Sinhala-Brāhmī by the corresponding forms² derived from Southern Brāhmī. This development indicates that the earlier forms are more likely to be native to the Tamil-Brāhmī script in which they continued to exist and gradually evolved into the corresponding Vaṭṭeḻuttu forms.

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¹ Compare the forms in Palaeographic Chart 2 with the corresponding forms illustrated in S. Karunaratne 1984: Figs. 1, 2, 26 and 34.

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² S. Karunaratne, ibid.

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