Indian Antiquary Vol 42

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarkar
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 386

XIX
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
[CHAPTER III
forms which they assumed in manuscript
? a
appearance of the Sarada form of k (Fig. 14, 1.2 b) in Part II is quite exceptional. It oceurs only once. Its use would seem to have grown gradually more frequent, till it finally became distinctive of the Sarada script. On the other hand, that script selected for itself (Fig. 14, 1, 28), from the two co-existent forms of the palatal á, the flat-topped variety, which is used in Parts V-VII.
The forms which the Gupta script developed on its transference to Central Asia are shown in Fig. 15. That figure shows the
Fig. 15. same series of letters (as in Fig. 14) in the 1 forms which they assumed in manuscripts written in the Buddhist settlement at Kuchar.
They are extracted from Parts II and IX i 2 the Weber Manuscripts, which are shown in Plate I, Fig. 2, and Plate III, Figs, 3-5, **
The upright and slanting scripts of Kuchar. in my Report on the Weber Manuscripts in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Vol. LXII, Part I (1893), pp. 1-39. It will be seen from Fig. 15 that there are two distinct varieties of the Kuchari script, the second variety (lower line) showing an appreciable slant which is absent from the first variety.s4. The latter variety, it will be noticed, resembles much more closely the upright ductus of the Gupta script as it was current in northern India, and as it prevails in the Bower Manuscript. The latter Manuscript, as has been explained in Chapter II, is written mainly i.e., all except Part VI) on inferior and damaged bireh-bark, which cirumstance suggests its having been written by Indian emigrants on remnants of the store of birch-bark which they had brought with them from India 65 On the other hand, the Weber Manuscripts are written on paper, which was the ordinary writing material of Eastern Turkestan. The two varieties of the Kucbari script, shown in these manuscripts, were current contemporaneously; for they were all dug out from the Qutluq Urdâ stúpa jn the vicinity of Kuchar (see Chapter 1). How the divergence of the two varieties arose is not known. What the difference of the writing material, however, suggests is that the manuscripts on bircb-bark, such as the Bower Manuscript, were written at an earlier date than the manuscripts on paper. The former probably wero written by immediate immigrants from India, who still possessed some store of birch-bark, their native writing material, while the latter were written by their descendants, or by native Kuchari converts wlio naturally made use of the paper of their own country. In this connection a curious point may be noticed. The upright variety (upper line in Fig. 15) conserves the Southern Indian fashion of writing the syllables ru and rů (e and f), the jutting e (a), and (though not quite distinctly) the flat-topped (8), all of which fashions are peculiar to Parts V-VII of the Bower Manuscript. On the other hand, the slanting variety (lower line of Fig. 15) conserves the northern fashion of writing ru and ri (e and f?, and the round-toppedá (g) of Parts I-III, with which, however, it combines the southern
The two varieties are showa also in Fig. 17, where the difference of the upright (c) and slanting (a) forms of " and th (in II, 1, 2, 3, respectively) is very clearly marked.
65 This conclusion is suggested also by the circumstance mentioned carver (p. xxix) that the letter * is written in Parts V-VII with an approach to the slant which distinguishes one of the two varieties of the fully developed Kuchari script.