Early South Indian Palaeography c12.2

c12.2

The existence of lithic records incised in the Brāhmī script in North India and the Deccan has been known for a very long time. Even as early as the fourteenth century A.D. when Firoz Shah Tughlak shifted the Aśokan pillars from Topra and Meerut to Delhi, it is said, he invited a number of Sanskrit scholars to read the writings on the pillars, but they were not able to decipher their script. It is also said that Akbar, the Mughal Emperor, was inquisitive about the writings on the pillars and that his attempts to have them read met with no better result. And it was only a little over a hundred years ago that the mystery of the script of the Aśokan edicts was unravelled by western scholars like Ch. Lassen and James Princep in the fourth decade of the last century, and that forms the foundation of our knowledge of the ancient art of writing, language and history of India. But the provenance of early records written in the Brāhmī script in the Tamil country was not known till the beginning of the present century when the first Brāhmī inscription was found in 1903 in the cavern at Kīḷavaḷavu in the Madurai District and copied by the officers of the Epigrahpical Branch of the Archaeological Survey of India. But the importance of the record was not realised immediately. Three years later, in 1906, L. A. Cammiade, a Civil Servant in the District of Tirunelveli, reported the discovery of another cavern with Brāhmī inscriptions at Marugāḷtalai. This prompted the making of vigorous attempts to trace similar caverns with Brāhmī inscriptions in other parts of the Tamil country; and it bore ample fruit. The majority of the short Brāhmī inscriptions under study in this book were discovered in the southern districts of the Tamil country in the next five or six years by the officers of the Epigraphical Branch of the Archaeological Survey of India.