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THE ALPHABET
Development of Indian Scripts
EARLY PERIOD (UP TO FOURTH CENTURY A.D.)
The intricate development of the numerous ancient and modern Indian scripts presents many problems. The Lalita Vistara mentions 64 alphabets known at the time of the Buddha. We do not know whether this number is correct; it may be exaggerated, or late conditions may have been anticipated. The framework of the Lalita Vistara is perhaps 2,000 years old, but the extant Sanskrit and Tibetan versions cannot be older than the seventh century A.D., and passages, like those concerning writing, are considered to be interpolations of the ninth or tenth century A.D.
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However, some of the scripts can be identified: the Brahmi or Bambhi, the Kharoshthi or Kharotthi, the Yavananaliya or Yavanamiya, which is obviously the Greek script, the Dravidi or Damili, the Tamil prototype (?) script, and so forth; others are probably only varieties of the main types. At any rate, there is no doubt that even in early times, there were many Indian scripts. A very ancient slab in Jain temple No. 1 at Deogarh bears specimens of 18 scripts and 18 forms of speech (bhasha).
The traditional name of the ancestor of the Indian scripts, the Brahmi (sc. lipi) appears in the third or fourth century A.D., about a thousand years after its invention. At that time, its creation was attributed to Brahma himself, as its true origin had already been forgotten.
James Prinsep (b. 1799, d. 1840), the unfortunately short lived Boden Professor of Sanskrit in the University of Oxford, laid the basis for the decipherment of the Brahmi script. Within the short period of five years, 1834-39, he established the foundation of modern knowledge of the ancient Indian scripts; "he was one of the most talented and useful men that England has given to India," was rightly said of him by another great English Indianist, Edward Thomas. Masson, Lassen, Norris, Cunningham and other scholars, mostly English, also contributed to our knowledge of these earliest scripts.
Main Types of Early Indian or Brahmi Scripts
Buehler, the greatest authority on the history of Indian writing, distinguished eight main types of the early Indian scripts:
(1) Script Written from Right to Left
It is the script already mentioned of the brief legend of five syllables, Dhamapalasa, of the Eran coin (Fig. 155, 2), written from right to left, of the fourth or third century B.C. Till recently, the evidence of the Eran coin could not be regarded as conclusive concerning the direction of writing of the original Brahmi. Many scholars assumed it to be due to a fault in the matrix from which the coin had been cast. Curiously enough, these scholars still adhere to their view and have overlooked the fact that in 1929 a new discovery was made. In that year Anu Ghose, a geologist from Calcutta, found at Yerragudi, Kurnool district in the Madras
