Brāhmī script
Brāhmī is a writing system from ancient India[1] that appeared as a fully developed script in the 3rd century BCE.[2] Its descendants, the Brahmic scripts, continue to be used today across South and Southeastern Asia.[3][4][5]
The Brahmi script is mentioned in the ancient Indian texts of the three major Dharmic religions: Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism, as well as their Chinese translations.[6][7] For example, the 10th chapter of the Lalitavistara Sūtra (c. 200–300 CE),[8] titled the Lipisala samdarshana parivarta, lists 64 lipi (scripts), with the Brahmi script starting the list. The Lalitavistara Sūtra states that young Siddhartha, the future Gautama Buddha (~500 BCE), mastered philology, Brahmi and other scripts from the Brahmin Lipikāra and Deva Vidyāsiṃha at a school.[6][9]
Historical overview
Brahmi is an abugida and uses a system of diacritical marks to associate vowels with consonant symbols. The writing system only went through relatively minor evolutionary changes from the Mauryan period (3rd century BCE) down to the early Gupta period (4th century CE), and it is thought that as late as the 4th century CE, a literate person could still read and understand Mauryan inscriptions.[10] Sometime thereafter, the ability to read the original Brahmi script was lost. The earliest (indisputably dated) and best-known Brahmi inscriptions are the rock-cut edicts of Ashoka in north-central India, dating to 250–232 BCE. During the late 20th century CE, the notion that Brahmi originated before the 3rd century BCE gained strength when archaeologists working at Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka retrieved Brahmi inscriptions on pottery belonging to the 450-350 BCE period.[11]
Notes
- ↑ Salomon 1998, p. 17. "Until the late nineteenth century, the script of the Aśokan (non-Kharosthi) inscriptions and its immediate derivatives was referred to by various names such as 'lath' or 'Lat', 'Southern Aśokan', 'Indian Pali', 'Mauryan', and so on. The application to it of the name Brahmi [sc. lipi], which stands at the head of the Buddhist and Jaina script lists, was first suggested by T[errien] de Lacouperie, who noted that in the Chinese Buddhist encyclopedia Fa yiian chu lin the scripts whose names corresponded to the Brahmi and Kharosthi of the Lalitavistara are described as written from left to right and from right to left, respectively. He therefore suggested that the name Brahmi should refer to the left-to-right 'Indo-Pali' script of the Aśokan pillar inscriptions, and Kharosthi to the right-to-left 'Bactro-Pali' script of the rock inscriptions from the northwest."
- ↑ Salomon 1998, p. 17. "... the Brahmi script appeared in the third century BCE as a fully developed pan-Indian national script (sometimes used as a second script even within the proper territory of Kharosthi in the north-west) and continued to play this role throughout history, becoming the parent of all of the modern Indic scripts both within India and beyond. Thus, with the exceptions of the Indus script in the protohistoric period, of Kharosthi in the northwest in the ancient period, and of the Perso–Arabic and European scripts in the medieval and modern periods, respectively, the history of writing in India is virtually synonymous with the history of the Brahmi script and its derivatives."
- ↑ Salomon 1998, pp. 19–30.
- ↑ Salomon, Richard (1995). "Review: On the Origin of the Early Indian Scripts". Journal of the American Oriental Society. 115 (2): 271–278. doi:10.2307/604670. JSTOR 604670.
- ↑ "Brahmi". Encyclopedia Britannica. 1999. Archived from the original on 2020-07-19. Retrieved 2017-03-21.
Among the many descendants of Brāhmī are Devanāgarī (used for Sanskrit, Hindi and other Indian languages), the Bengali and Gujarati scripts and those of the Dravidian languages
Unknown parameter|url-status=ignored (help) - ↑ 6.0 6.1 Georg Bühler (1898). On the Origin of the Indian Brahma Alphabet. K.J. Trübner. pp. 6, 14–15, 23, 29. Archived from the original on 2020-07-27. Retrieved 2016-10-18. Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help), Quote: "(...) a passage of the Lalitavistara which describes the first visit of Prince Siddhartha, the future Buddha, to the writing school..." (page 6); "In the account of Prince Siddhartha's first visit to the writing school, extracted by Professor Terrien de la Couperie from the Chinese translation of the Lalitavistara of 308 CE, there occurs besides the mention of the sixty-four alphabets, known also from the printed Sanskrit text, the utterance of the Master Visvamitra[.]" - ↑ Salomon 1998, pp. 8–10 with footnotes
- ↑ L. A. Waddell (1914). "The So-Called "Mahapadana" Suttanta and the Date of the Pali Canon". The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. 46 (3): 661–680. doi:10.1017/S0035869X00047055. Archived from the original on 2010-12-06. Retrieved 2022-02-12. Unknown parameter
|s2cid=ignored (help); Unknown parameter|url-status=ignored (help) - ↑ Nado, Lopon (1982). "The Development of Language in Bhutan". The Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies. 5 (2): 95.
Under different teachers, such as the Brahmin Lipikara and Deva Vidyasinha, he mastered Indian philology and scripts. According to Lalitavistara, there were as many as sixty-four scripts in India.
- ↑ Beckwith, Christopher I. (2017). Greek Buddha: Pyrrho's Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia. Princeton University Press. p. 242. ISBN 978-0-691-17632-1. Archived from the original on 2021-10-14. Retrieved 2020-01-01. Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help) - ↑ "The oldest Brahmi script in Sri Lanka found in Anuradhapura and other cities Inscriptions of Sri Lanka". 2022-01-22. Retrieved 2025-07-20.
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