Brāhmī refers to the pre-modern members of the Brahmic family of scripts. The best known inscriptions in Brāhmī 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

This script is ancestral to most of the scripts of South Asia, Southeast Asia, Tibet, Mongolia, and perhaps even Korean Hangul. The Brāhmī numeral system is the ancestor of the Hindu-Arabic numerals, which are now used world-wide.

Brāhmī 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,

A glance at the oldest Brāhmī inscriptions shows striking parallels with contemporary Aramaic for the half of the phonemes that are equivalent between the two languages, especially if the letters are flipped to reflect the change in writing direction. However, Semitic is not a good phonological match to Indic, so any Semitic alphabet would have needed extensive (and perhaps planned) modification. Indeed, this is the most convincing circumstantial evidence for a link: the similarities between the scripts are just what one would expect from such an adaptation. For example, Aramaic did not distinguish dental from retroflex stops; in Brāhmī the dental and retroflex series are graphically very similar, as if both had been derived from a single prototype. Aramaic did not have Brāhmī's aspirated consonants (kh, th), whereas Brāhmī did not have Aramaic's emphatic consonants (q, ṭ, ṣ); and it appears that Aramaic's extra emphatic letters may have been used to fill in Brāhmī's missing aspirates (Aramaic q for Brāhmī kh, Aramaic ṭ for Brāhmī th). And just where Aramaic did not have a corresponding emphatic stop, p, Brāhmī seems to have doubled up for its aspirate: Brahmi p and ph are graphically very similar, as if taken from the same source. The first letters of the alphabets also match: Brāhmī a looks a lot like Aramaic alef.

A minority position holds that Brāhmī was a purely indigenous development, perhaps with the Indus script as its predecessor; these include the English scholars G.R. Hunter and Raymond Allchin.

Literature

• Kenneth R. Norman's, The Development of Writing in India and its Effect upon the Pâli Canon, in Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde Südasiens (36), 1993
• Oscar von Hinüber, Der Beginn der Schrift und frühe Schriftlichkeit in Indien, Franz Steiner Verlag, 1990 (in german)
• Gérard Fussman's, Les premiers systèmes d'écriture en Inde, in Annuaire du Collège de France 1988-1989 (in french)
• Siran Deraniyagala's The prehistory of Sri Lanka; an ecological perspective (revised ed.), Archaeological Survey Department of Sri Lanka, 1992.

Examples

Brahmi Aksara Brahmi Brahmi-skrift Brahmi 波罗米文