Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c10.6

c10.6

And that, as I see it, is what we find. I have already suggested (p. 24) the likelihood that at the end of the 6th century B.C., when Achaemenid Persia acquired its Indian province, Persia supplied India, not merely with administrators, but also with new materials and ideas: above all, with the use of iron, which now appears in India for the first time, and the idea of a currency, which was minted at Taxila in native guise but on Persian standards, and emerged in the Ganges basin in or shortly after the 5th century B.C. Persia moreover lent India the Aramaic alphabet which, with Aramaic speech, had been the official medium of communication throughout the Achaemenid empire. In India this script was modified to suit the local Prākṛit language and, as Kharoshṭhī, was used by Ashoka for his inscriptions in the north-west. Even as far south as Brahmagiri, the Ashokan scribe has added a word in this alien Kharoshṭhī, though elsewhere in metropolitan India the Brāhmī script was unchallenged.