Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c25.s6.t1: 5.6.1 Mauryan Brāhmī
Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c25.s6.t1
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5.6.1 Mauryan Brāhmī
c25.s6.t1.1
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.
c25.s6.t1.2
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*.
c25.s6.t1.3
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).