I have always been fascinated by languages—and how they portray the character of the people who speak them. Like many who grew up when I did, I studied Latin in high school, and a bit of Spanish. Later I studied both French and German, and right after high school I studied a bit of Russian, which was like a puzzle due to its Cyrillic alphabet. Over the years in my work with classical and folk music and now chanting, I’ve sung in going on twenty different languages, so I’ve had a chance to experience many.
When I first learned the small bit I know about Sanskrit, I was taken aback at the alphabet. It was so elegant and so different from any of the other languages I’d studied. I knew that it was codified around the 11th Century, much later than the original spoken Sanskrit in which scriptures were memorized and transmitted to others, so I assumed that the grammarians who did the codification created the unique order of vowels and consonants.
In my research this week, I discovered that I was wrong. I spoke of Tamil being an ancient language last week, and the early Tamil and Prakrit languages were written in Brahmi, a script that was also the precursor for written Sanskrit—and probably a hundred other languages of India and the Middle East—as far away as the Philippines, and including Gujarati, Punjabi, Bengali, Telugu, Tibetan, Burmese, Thai, Javanese, Balinese, and Tagalog. [The first picture above is Tamil written with early Brahmi script and the second picture is Om Namah Shivaya written in modern Sanskrit.]
It was the Brahmi alphabet itself that had the unique structure that I found so elegant: where, unlike our alphabet that seems to have been devised topsy-turvy, the vowels are separate from the consonants and the letters move through the cathedral of the mouth from the back to the front! Just elegant!
Here’s just a little of what I found out about the development of the Brahmi script in this week’s research. I’ll talk more about the magic of Sanskrit itself in the next edition. If you’re interested in this kind of material, feel free to explore the resources I list. There is much more material online and it is a fascinating story! Enjoy!
Brahmi, Mother Script of Modern Indian and Asian Scripts
In the earliest written records of India, Ashokan Inscriptions hold the key to the story of writing. These epigraphs were written in Greek, Aramaic, Kharosthi, and Brahmi. The origins of the first three scripts are not disputed, but the beginnings of Brãhmi pretty much elude the grasp of historians. The majority of western scholars trace Brahmi’s origin from Hieratic, cuneiform, Phoenician, Aramaic and/or Kharosthi, but a few foreign scholars and most Indian scholars believe in its indigenous origin.
The Indus civilization invented Indus script in India, but another script became the most influential writing system. It is the Brahmi script. All the modern scripts in India and hundreds of other scripts found in South East and East Asia are directly derived from Brahmi script.
Though it looks like syllabic writing, it is classified as an alpha-syllabic writing system because, rather than representing individual consonant and vowel sounds, its basic writing units represent syllables of various kinds, for example, a consonant and vowel, two consonants and a vowel, three consonants and a vowel, consonant vowel consonant, vowel consonant. The vowel and consonant component of Brahmi symbols are clearly distinguishable.
Origin of Brahmi script Many scholars have put forth different ideas about the origination of Brahmi script.
In the late 19 century Georg Buhler advanced the idea that Brahmi was derived from the Semitic script and adapted by the Brahman scholars to suit the phonetic of Sanskrit and Prakrit. India became exposed to Semitic writing during the sixth century BCE when the Achaemenid empire took control of the Indus valley (part of present day Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Northwestern India). Aramaic was the language of administration in that empire and official records were written using a North Semitic script.
There was a language called Kharosthi that dominated the Indus valley region at that time. But the Brahmi script was employed in the rest of India and other parts of South Asia. There is no argument that Kharosthi is an adaptation of Semitic but the connection between Brahmi and Semitic remains unclear.
By the second century BCE, the Brahmi script became more widespread and we can also detect the rise of marked regional variations.
Another position has argued that the precursor of the Brahmi script is a system of symbols found on graffiti marks located on several sites in Tamil–Nadu (South India). In this region hundreds of graffiti either inscribed or carved on potsherds and rock have been found: some of the symbols are found at the end of Brahmi inscriptions. Whether Brahmi truly derives from graffiti is hard to confirm but the connection between the two systems cannot be ruled out.
There is a third position that claims that Brahmi derives from the Indus script, the writing system employed in the Indus civilization which fell out of use as this civilization came to an end. Those who support this hypothesis point out the resemblance between some of the signs of the scripts. Given the complete absence of material evidence linking both writing systems, this view seems both speculative and hard to verify.
For those of you who are mathematicians, you should know that one source posits that most of the letters of the Brahmi alphabet betray very close resemblance to geometrical forms such as semi-circle, circle, ellipse, cycloid, triangle, angle and quadrangle etc. The knowledge of geometrical symbols in ancient India is proved both by the Harappan and early Vedic evidences. Geometry as a science was first invented in India by the Aryans for framing the rules for the construction of sacrificial altars.
From the application of mathematical knowledge to the exigencies of religious life, sacrifices, rituals, construction of altars etc., it is more than clear that the Rigvedic Aryans not only knew geometry but applied it in many fields including art. No wonder, therefore, that these geometric signs, already prevalent before the emergence of Brãhmi, may have given birth to the letters of an alphabet.
Another question about the origin of the Brahmi script relates to its antiquity. Until a few decades ago, the earliest securely dated examples available of the Brahmi script dated back to the third century BCE. These examples were found on a set of royal rock inscriptions spread in northern central India by the Indian ruler Ashoka (r. 268 BCE to 232 BCE), known as the Ashokan Inscriptions.
Despite the lack of any earlier examples some scholars argue that the Brahmi script originated earlier than the third century BCE. They supported such a claim on the basis of a number of observations. Firstly, the composition of a set of texts, the Brahmanas, which were attached to the Vedic literature during the sixth century BC.
The Brahmanas are the only section of the Vedas written mostly in prose, unlike the earlier sections which are hymns especially designed for oral transmission. The emergence of prose is hard to imagine without the support of writing technology.
Further evidence comes from the work of Panini, the ancient Indian grammarian who composed an influential work on grammar analysis of Sanskrit during the fifth or fourth century BCE. It is unlikely that a work like that could have been produced in a preliterate context. Knowledge of writing in India is also recorded by writers who joined Alexander to India roughly a century before the time of Ashoka.
During the late 20th century CE, the notion that Brahmi originated before the third century BCE gained strength with archaeologists working in Sri Lanka who retrieved Brahmi inscriptions on pottery belonging to the 450 to 350 BCE. The earliest of these examples are single letters, and their dates have been established through radiocarbon dating. The language of these descriptions is North Indian Prakrit (Middle Indic), an Indo-Aryan language.
Brahmi Script Development Most examples of Brahmi found in North and Central India represent Prakrit language. The Ashokan Inscriptions already show some slight regional variations on the Brahmi script. In South India, particularly in Tamil-Nadu, Brahmi inscriptions represent Tamil, a language belonging into the Dravidian language family with no linguistic affiliation to the Indian Indo-Aryan languages such as Sanskrit or Prakrit.
Brahmi script was used back at third century BCE, during the time when India was ruled by the Mauryan dynasty. Ashokan inscriptions are found on carved rocks, caves, stone slabs, and rock pillars. We also have some examples of short Brahmi inscriptions on small seals made of ivory, bones, stone, and terra-cotta dated to Mauryan times. Other examples come from potsherds and copper plates.
With the rise of Buddhism as a dominant faith in India, we find Brahmi inscriptions on monumental constructions known as “donative records”, stating the names of different donors. The early second century BCE saw the beginning of Brahmi inscriptions on coins.
The use of perishable materials as a writing medium was an ancient widespread practice in South Asia, particularly palm leaf and birch bark. As portable and affordable writing surfaces, these materials are ideal. Direct material evidence on the use of palm leaf and Birch before the time of the Ashokan Inscriptions have not been found due no doubt to the destruction of evidence over time rather than the actual absence of a written tradition on perishable materials.
The earliest identifiable use of Brahmi script found on ceramic surfaces was to indicate ownership of the item. Toward the mid-3rd century BCE, we see the first example of Brahmi being used for official communication in the production of seals and on the Ashokan Inscriptions. A few centuries later Brahmi begins to be employed both in architecture and for the transmission of religious texts.
If we accept the view that the use of Brahmi predates the earliest archaeological examples identified so far, then we could speculate that the earliest use of Brahmi was for the recording of commercial transactions and other forms of record-keeping. This is based on the fact that all over the world there is a tendency for writing systems to rise when the need of recording information becomes essential as a result of the rise of urbanism, social complexity, taxation, and increasing reliance on redistribution systems to support the growing demographic pressure.
In North India, this process was well underway by the seventh century BCE. It would be unlikely that North India was able to develop and sustain such a level of social and economic transformation, including the rise of cities and kingdoms, in the absence of writing. If the work of Panini was produced with the aid of the Brahmi script, we could add that at some point during the 5th to fourth century BCE the system was refined and improved by the North Indian grammarians.
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