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Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages c7.s1.t2: 2.1.2 The antiquity of writing in India of the historical period

Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages c7.s1.t2

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2.1.2 The antiquity of writing in India of the historical period

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O. von Hinüber, *Der Beginn der Schrift* . . . [BS]; H. Falk, *Schrift im alten Indien* [SAI].

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After more than a century of study, the early history of writing in India remains problematic. It begins with the still undeciphered script found on the seals and other relics of the Indus Valley civilization, which flourished, according to recent estimates, around the second half of the third and first half of the second millennium B.C. But after the decline of the Indus Valley culture, the graphic record of India is virtually a total blank for well over a thousand years until the time of the Aśokan inscriptions, the earliest definitely datable written records of the historical period, around the middle of the third century B.C. From this time on, written records (epigraphic and, in later centuries, manuscript and other nonepigraphic sources) become increasingly common, so that the development of the Indian scripts and their many derivatives both in and outside of India can, for the most part, be traced in considerable detail from Aśoka’s time to the present day.

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But practically nothing is known of what might have happened in the long period between (very roughly) 1750 and 260 B.C. Certain bits of evidence have been proposed as missing links between the protohistoric and historical writings. For example, graffiti found on megalithic and chalcolithic pottery from southern and western India were discussed by B. B. Lal,¹⁰ who noted (23–4) resemblances of some of the shapes found in these graffiti to both Indus Valley script characters and letters of the Brāhmī script. However, Lal concluded with the suitably cautious note that “to stress the point that the symbols do have a phonetic, syllabic or alphabetic value would indeed be presumptuous in the present state of our knowledge” (24). A few inscriptions, or pseudo-inscriptions, have been proposed as specimens of “prehistoric” writing or “missing links” between the Indus Valley script and Brāhmī, for instance, the Vikramkhol “inscription,” but none of these examples of supposed prehistorical writing is convincing.¹¹ In short, the evidence currently available does not permit us to determine conclusively whether the art of writing simply died out in the second millennium B.C., to be replaced much later by unrelated systems, or whether (though this seems much less likely) some form of it, as yet undiscovered, somehow survived and reemerged in the form of the scripts of historical times.

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¹⁰ “From the Megalithic to the Harappa: Tracing Back the Graffiti on the Pottery,” *Ancient India* 16, 1960, 4–24.

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¹¹ Possible connections between the Indus Valley writing and Brāhmī are further discussed in section 2.2.3.1.

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Because of the virtual absence of actual documentary evidence for writing in the blank period, many historians and epigraphists have addressed the question of the possibility of literacy in pre-Mauryan India through the examination of literary and other evidence. The literature on the subject is far too extensive to be presented in detail here. The discussions by Burnell (SIP 1–11), Bühler (OIBA 5–35 and BIP 3–6), Ojhā (BPLM 1–16), Pandey (PIP 1–22), and Sircar (IIEP 104–6) may be taken as more or less representative of earlier opinions, of which a complete survey and up-to-date analysis is provided in Falk's SAI. To begin with Vedic literature, certain authors (notably Ojhā in BPLM 9–13 and, mostly following him, Pandey and others) have claimed evidence for a literate culture in the later Vedic texts, and even in the *Ṛg Veda*, on the grounds of references therein to poetic meters, grammatical and phonetic terms, very large numbers, and relatively complex arithmetic calculations. But it is by no means certain that such cultural phenomena presuppose literacy, and it may be argued to the contrary that the absence of a single explicit and indisputable reference to writing anywhere in early Vedic literature suggests that the Vedic culture was a preliterate one.¹²

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¹² See the classic presentation of this position in F. Max Müller's *History of Sanskrit Literature So Far as It Illustrates the Primitive Religion of the Brahmans* (London: Williams and Norgate, 1859), 455–80. See also BIP 5 and, more recently, BS 18 and SAI 240–56.

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The testimony of Greek and Latin authors on writing in early India has been studied by many scholars¹³ but remains somewhat inconclusive. For example, Nearchos, who visited northwestern India around 325 B.C., explicitly mentions that Indians wrote letters (ἐπιστολὰς) on cotton cloth. This observation is usually assumed to refer to the Kharoṣṭhī script, but it has recently been suggested¹⁴ that Nearchos may actually have been referring to writing in Aramaic. Megasthenes, who lived in northeastern India some two decades after Nearchos, stated that the Indians "did not know written characters" (οὐδὲ γὰρ γράμματα εἰδέναι αὐτούς), but it is not entirely certain whether this is a blanket statement¹⁵ or refers only to the immediate context of legal procedures in which the comment was made. The confusion on this issue among the classical historians seems to be reflected in Strabo's comment, with reference to Nearchos' report, that "others opine that they did not make use of written characters."

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¹³ Most recently and authoritatively by von Hinüber (BS 19–21) and Falk (SAI 290–7).

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¹⁴ By von Hinüber, BS 21; cf. SAI 290.

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¹⁵ So von Hinüber, BS 20; cf. SAI 291–3.

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The Pāli Buddhist canon, especially the *Jātakas* and the *Vinaya-piṭaka*, contains numerous explicit references to writing and written documents, particularly to "private and official correspondence by means of letters" (OIBA 7). But it is uncertain whether any of these references can really be taken to represent the state of things in pre-Mauryan India, as Bühler and others have claimed, since all or most of them seem to belong to the later strata of the canon (BS 22–54; SAI 270–83). In Pāṇini's *Aṣṭādhyāyī* (3.2.21) we seem to have a clear reference to early writing in the term *lipi*/*libi* 'script'.¹⁶ Pāṇini's date is a matter of complex controversy, but an authoritative recent opinion is that "the evidence available hardly allows one to date Pāṇini later than the early to mid fourth century B.C.,”¹⁷ which would seem to provide us a strong indication of writing before the Mauryan period. But here too (as in the case of Nearchos), it has recently been suggested¹⁸ that the script known to Pāṇini might be Aramaic rather than any Indian script.

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¹⁶ Although even this has been questioned; see BS 57. The term *grantha* (*Aṣṭādhyāyī* 1.3.75, 4.3.87, 4.3.116), though normally rendered "book," need not necessarily refer to a written composition (SAI 261–2, 298–9).

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¹⁷ George Cardona, *Pāṇini: A Survey of Research* (Mouton: The Hague/Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1976), 268.

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¹⁸ BS 58; SAI 258.

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As to archaeological and epigraphic evidence for the antiquity of writing in the historical period, we have only a small handful of brief archaic inscriptions (see 4.3.1.2) which could conceivably be somewhat older than the Aśokan inscriptions. But the weight of scholarly opinion nowadays¹⁹ is in favor of dating such early records as the Piprāwā, Sohgaurā, and Mahāsthān inscriptions as contemporary with or later than Aśoka.²⁰ Certain paleographic characteristics of the early inscriptions, such as the absence of distinction in some records (e.g., Mahāsthān) of vowel length—mostly for vowels other than *a* and *ā*—have sometimes been taken as an indication of their pre-Aśokan antiquity; yet the very same phenomena have been invoked by others in support of arguments for a recent origin and short period of development for the Brāhmī script. Equally inconclusive is the matter of alleged regional variations in early Brāhmī. Bühler (OIBA 40; cf. BIP 6–8) took this as evidence that “the letters of the [Aśokan] edicts had been used at least during four or five hundred years,” but more recent studies by C. S. Upasak and A. H. Dani (see 2.2.4) have largely discredited the supposed regional variants of Aśokan Brāhmī, and some (e.g., S. R. Goyal in OBS 7–10) have taken the geographical unity of the Aśokan script as evidence that it must have been a recent invention or development.

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¹⁹ Reviewed in SAI 177–88.

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²⁰ All attempts to attribute specific dates to certain of the early inscriptions have been decisively discredited. For example, Ojhā’s (BPLM 2–3) dating of the Baṛlī inscription (SI 89–90) to the year 84 of a supposed Jaina era of 527 B.C., i.e., to 443 B.C., is out of the question; Sircar dates the inscription to the late second century B.C. on paleographic grounds. The alleged specimens of Kharoṣṭhī and Brāhmī letters on coins of the Achaemenian emperors of Iran are also doubtful (see 2.3.2 n. 132).

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However, a new body of material has recently come to light that seems to support the older theory that Brāhmī existed before Mauryan times, that is, in the fourth century B.C. or possibly even earlier. This is a small group of potsherds bearing short inscriptions, evidently proper names, which were found in the course of excavations at Anurādhapura, Sri Lanka in strata which are said to be securely assigned by radiocarbon dating to the pre-Mauryan period.²¹ Various dates have been proposed for these graffiti, ranging from the sixth to the early fourth century B.C. The more recent publications on the subject have tended to favor the later date within this range, but in any case, these inscriptions still seem to show that Brāhmī did indeed predate the Mauryan period. Some doubts remain, however, as to the chronological significance of these inscriptions; it is possible, for example, that the inscribed potsherds were intrusive in the strata concerned, and actually date from a later period, although the excavators have argued against this scenario.

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²¹ See S. U. Deraniyagala, *The Prehistory of Sri Lanka: An Ecological Perspective* (Archaeological Survey of Sri Lanka, 1992), 2.739–50; F. R. Allchin, *The Archaeology of Early Historic South Asia: The Emergence of Cities and States* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 163–81 and 209–16; R. A. F. Coningham, F. R. Allchin, C. M. Batt, and D. Lucy, “Passage to India? Anuradhapura and the Early Use of the Brahmi Script,” *Cambridge Archaeological Journal* 6, 1996, 73–97 (esp. 76–7); and further references provided in these sources.

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In conclusion, both the literary and the epigraphic evidence for the antiquity of historical writing in India are disappointingly inconclusive, since virtually all of the testimony is in one way or another vague or ambiguous. Probably the most cogent single piece of literary evidence for writing before the Mauryan period is Pāṇini's reference to script (*lipi*), although the uncertainties as to his date partially vitiate the value of this testimony. Moreover, although it seems clear that this proves the existence of some form of writing in Pāṇini's home region of northwestern South Asia in or before the mid-fourth century B.C., there is no explicit indication as to what type of script²² he is referring to. Although, as noted earlier, Falk and von Hinüber have recently suggested that may have been Aramaic, there is actually no cogent reason to rule out Kharoṣṭhī, which therefore may well date back to the mid-fourth century B.C. or quite possibly even earlier (see 2.3.2 and 2.3.6). But even if this is so, there is no direct evidence for the use of Brāhmī before the time of Aśoka. Thus, the trend of recent writings such as BS²³ and SAI has been to emphasize an empirical interpretation of the actual surviving data, which leads to the conclusion that at least Brāhmī, and probably Kharoṣṭhī as well, did not exist before the Mauryan period, and hence that (leaving aside the protohistoric Indus script) writing originated in India no earlier than the late fourth century B.C. However, the recent discovery, mentioned above, of apparently pre-Mauryan graffiti in Sri Lanka has cast some doubt upon this point of view.

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²² As has been noted in various sources, most recently SAI 259–61, the interpretation of Pāṇini's prescription (4.1.49) of the feminine adjective *yavanānī* as referring to *lipi*, i.e., the Greek script, is based on a *vārtikā* of Kātyāyana and hence does not prove anything about Pāṇini's own knowledge of Greek script.

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²³ E.g., BS 22: "Fremde Beobachtungen sprechen also in Übereinstimmung mit den Zeugnissen aus Epigraphik und Numismatik eindeutig dafür, daß es in Indien vor Aśoka keine Schrift gegeben hat, wenn man von den indischen Provinzen des Achämenidenreiches absieht." ("Thus, foreign observations clearly agree with the testimony of epigraphy and numismatics that there was no writing in India before Aśoka, with the exception of the Indian provinces of the Achaemenian empire.")

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Moreover, many other authorities have found it difficult to imagine that the evidently high level of political organization and cultural complexity that had been reached in the pre-Mauryan period could have existed without writing. Thus various estimates for a hypothetical prehistory of Indian writing have been proposed. Bühler's suggestion (OIBA 84; also BIP 16) of an early date of ca. 800 B.C., or possibly even earlier, for the "introduction of the prototypes of the Brāhma letters" into India is hardly plausible in light of modern knowledge, but more cautious estimates such as that of A. B. Keith that "the real development of writing belongs in all likelihood to the fifth century B.C." are not unreasonable.²⁴ This more traditional point of view has recently been maintained by, among others, K. R. Norman.²⁵ Like other proponents of pre-Mauryan writing, Norman (279) attributes the absence of any surviving written records before the time of Aśoka to the fact that early writing was primarily used for ephemeral documents. The practice of writing monumental inscriptions on stone was presumably an innovation of Aśoka himself, possibly under the inspiration of the Achaemenian empire of neighboring Iran. Before Aśoka, writing was probably used principally, if not exclusively, for economic and administrative, as opposed to literary and monumental, purposes; perishable materials such as palm leaves, tree bark, and (according to Nearchos) cloth, which have little chance of surviving the rigors of the Indian climate, were used. Thus, according to this view, we need not be surprised that no early specimens of Indian writing have survived, and their absence does not prove that they never existed.

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²⁴ In E. J. Rapson, ed., *Cambridge History of India*, Vol. 1: *Ancient India* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), 126.

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²⁵ In his review of von Hinüber's BS in *JRAS*, ser. 3, vol. 3, 1993, 277–81. See also R. Salomon, "On the Origin of Early Indian Scripts" [review article on von Hinüber's BS, Falk's SAI, etc.], *JAOS* 115, 1995, 271–9, esp. 278–9.

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Such hypothetical pre-Mauryan writing would presumably (though not necessarily; see Goyal, OBS 2, 30) have been some protoform of Brāhmī and/or Kharoṣṭhī script. The nondifferentiation of vowel length in Kharoṣṭhī generally, and also, as noted earlier, in some early specimens of Brāhmī, suggests that a pre-Aśokan Brāhmī would not yet have distinguished vowel quantity. Similarly, indications from the extant early specimens suggest that the notation of consonant groups would have been rudimentary or even totally absent in their presumptive prototypes. The protoscripts may also have had an incomplete array of phonemes vis-à-vis Sanskrit, since they were presumably developed for recording early MIA dialects rather than Sanskrit. The confusion between *s* and *ṣ* in some early Brāhmī inscriptions (see 2.2.4), for example, suggests that the earliest forms of the script did not have distinct characters for the three sibilants of Sanskrit. The script that we actually have in the Aśokan inscriptions thus could be a refined and standardized "national" script, developed under Aśoka for purposes of governing his vast pan-Indian empire, on the basis of an earlier form of Brāhmī or proto-Brāhmī script, of which the Anurādhapura graffiti may be a specimen.

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In short, two schools of thought are dominant with regard to the problem of the antiquity of writing in historical India. One side sees no cogent archaeological or literary evidence for the existence of writing, and particularly of Brāhmī script, before the Mauryan period. The other camp finds this hard to accept on pragmatic grounds, and moreover now sees archaeological evidence of pre-Mauryan Brāhmī in the Anurādhapura graffiti, which are allegedly datable to the early fourth century B.C. at the latest. The issue remains unresolved, though it may be hoped that further discussions and examinations of the new evidence may ultimately lead to a consensus.

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