Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c25.s7.2

c25.s7.2

(1) An important feature of Tamil-Brāhmī is the relatively slower pace of evolution especially in the Early Period when compared with the contemporary Northern and Southern Brāhmī scripts of the post-Mauryan era. This is strikingly illustrated at Arikamedu by the occurrence of a pottery inscription in Hybrid Sanskrit³ in the Northern Brāhmī characters of ca. 1st century A.D. along with pottery inscriptions in Tamil-Brāhmī of about the same date but in which the characters look much earlier when judged in terms of Brāhmī palaeography. The slower pace of evolution is also shared by the Early Sinhala-Brāhmī script of the same period (ca. 2-1 centuries B.C.).⁴