Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages c7.s1.t2.16

c7.s1.t2.16

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.