Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c26.s6.11

c26.s6.11

Bühler deduced from these 'peculiarities' that "the consonants have no inherent *-a*" and that the vowel notations of the script were "invented in order to avoid the necessity for ligatures".¹ His deductions are astonishingly correct considering that neither can be illustrated from the inscriptions he edited. However, his conclusion "I do not think that it (the Bhattiprolu script) teaches us much regarding the history of the Southern Maurya characters"² has turned out to be wide of the mark. We can now see that the basic principle behind the Bhattiprolu notation must have originated in Tamil-Brāhmī and that its use at Bhattiprolu (probably by a Tamil scribe) was fortuitous because the casket inscriptions are in Prakrit which does not require this special notation. In fact, there is not a single example in these inscriptions of a final basic consonant which is the *raison d'etre* of the Bhattiprolu notation. However, the evolution of a separate marker for the medial *-ā* removing the ambiguity between the medial *-a* and *-ā* in the TB-I notation is an advance presently known only from Bhattiprolu.