Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c25.s6.t3: 5.6.3 The Bhattiprolu script
Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c25.s6.t3
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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.