Contents: Introduction | The Script | Links
This elegant script appeared in India most certainly by the 5th century BCE, but the fact that just like the Greek alphabet, it has many local variants, which suggests that its origin lies further back in time. It is in this script that the great Indian king Asoka inscribed his laws onto monumental columns.
At first glance, one can distinguish clearly the West Semitic origin of this writing system. For instance, the symbol for a resembles Semitic letter 'alif. Similarly, dha, tha, la, and ra all appear quite close to their Semitic counterparts/ancestors. There is, also, a slightly different school of thought that proposes a Southern Semitic origin. Still, a third school of thought holds that the Brahmi script came from Indus Valley Script. However, at least in my personal opinion, the lack of any textual evidence between the end of the Harappan period at around 1900 BC and the first Brahmi and Kharoshthi inscriptions at roughtly 500 BC makes the Indus origin of Brahmi highly unlikely. More research (as in digs) should be conducted, though, to either prove or disprove this theory.
Each character carries a consonant followed by the vowel "a", much like Old Persian or Meroïtic. However, unlike these two system, Brahmi indicates the same consonant with a different vowel with extra strokes attached to the character.
The Brahmi script was the ancestor of all Indian writing systems, including the Devanagari. In addition, many Asian scripts, such as Burmese, Thai, Tibetan, and even Japanese to a very small extent (vowel order), were also derived from Indian script. Thus the Brahmi script was the Indian equivalent of the Greek script that gave arise to a host of different systems. You can take a look at the evolution of Indian scripts, or the evolution of Southeast Asian scripts. Both of these pages are located at the very impressive site Languages and Scripts of India. You can also take a look at Asoka's edict at Girnar, inscribed in the Brahmi script.
This is the Brahmi script
And an example of strokes added to indicate different vowels followed
by consonants /k/ and /l/.
Related Scripts and Links:
Last revised June 18, 1997
Copied from
http://alumni.eecs.berkeley.edu/~lorentz/Ancient_Scripts/brahmi.html
on October 21, 1998
