Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c12.s12.22

c12.s12.22

Pāli does not at all agree with the Māgadhi and Ardha-Māgadhi dialects, later variants of the Prācya speech—it agrees rather with Śauraseni, which is the Midland speech as we find it in its later Prākṛit form. Pāli can only be looked upon linguistically as a literary form of the Midland speech as it was current in the centuries immediately before Christ. The Midland speech in its literary form thus was taken to Ceylon by Mahendra from Ujjain via Pāṭaliputra and Tāmralipti and from there brought back again into North India with the Theravāda doctrine by Buddhaghosha. In the meanwhile, it was coming into prominence from about the time of Christ, as an important and the best cultured form of a Middle Indo-Aryan speech, as Śauraseni Prākṛit, the earliest use of which we find in the drama fragment from Aśvaghosha discovered in Central Asia, and possibly also in Śūdraka's *Mṛicchakaṭikā*, a Prākṛit which Bharata noted some time during the early centuries after Christ and which Rājaśekhara lauded as the most elegant form of speech in the 8th century A.D.