Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages c7.s2.t4.6

c7.s2.t4.6

Moreover, searching for formal prototypes for each of the characters of early Brāhmī in one or the other alleged Semitic prototypes is one way, and not necessarily the most effective way, to address the problem. For even many of the supporters of the Semitic hypothesis concede that, in Dani's words, "[T]he Brāhmī letters are not literally 'derived' from the Semitic letters as is commonly understood, but are only based on them" (DIP 29).⁹¹ In other words, the relationship of Brāhmī to an alleged Semitic parent script may be more analogous to, say, that of the Arabic script and its presumptive Nabataean parent, which is widely accepted even though it cannot be traced in every detail,⁹² than it is to better attested derivations such as that of the Greek alphabet from Phoenician (which seems to have served as the model, consciously or otherwise, for the studies of Bühler et al.).