Information AboutBrahmi Alphabet |
|
refers to the pre-modern members of the Brahmic Family of scripts. The best known inscriptions in are the rock-cut Edicts Of Ashoka , dating to the 3rd Century BC . These were long considered the earliest examples of Brahmi writing, but recent archeological evidence in Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu may push back the date for the earliest use of Brahmi to the 5th or 6th Century BC , however the dating methods used have a significant margin of error. This script is ancestral to most of the scripts of South Asia , Southeast Asia , Tibet , Mongolia , and perhaps even Korea n Hangul . The Brāhmī Numeral system is the ancestor of the Hindu-Arabic Numerals , which are now used world-wide. is generally believed to be derived from a Semitic script such as the Imperial Aramaic Alphabet , as was clearly the case for the contempory Kharosthi alphabet that arose in a part of northwest Indian under the control of the Achaemenid Empire. Rhys Davids suggests that writing may have been introduced to India from the Middle East by traders. Another possibility is with the Achaemenid conquest in the late 6th Century BC . It was often assumed that it was a planned invention under Ashoka as a prerequiste for the his edicts. Compare the much better documented parallel of the Hangul script. Older examples of the Brahmi script appear to be on fragments of pottery from the trading town of Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka , which have been dated to the early 5th Century BC . Even earlier evidence of the Brahmi script has been discovered on pieces of pottery in Adichanallur, Tamil Nadu . Radio-carbon dating has established that they belonged to the 6th Century BC . {Link without Title} A glance at the oldest inscriptions shows striking parallels with contemporary Aramaic for a few of the ''. A minority position holds that was a purely indigenous development, perhaps with the Indus Script as its predecessor; these include the English scholars G.R. Hunter and Raymond Allchin . FURTHER READING
EXTERNAL LINKS
EXAMPLES in Mumbai have samples of many of these scripts.]] |
|
|