3. The Brahmi Script
- Brahmi appeared by the 5th c. BC.
- The underlying unity of Indian scripts due to the Brahmi.
- Like the Greek alphabet, it had many local variants and gave rise to many Asian scripts - Burmese, Thai, Tibetan, etc.
- Asoka inscribed his laws onto columns in Brahmi.
- Theory of Origin? : (i) West Semitic; (ii) Southern Semitic - but it works very differently from Semitic.
- Some trace it to Indus Script. But the Harappan ended by 1900 BC & the first Brahmi and Kharoshthi inscriptions date to roughly 500 BC. How does one explain the gap?
- Brahmi is a "syllabic alphabet", meaning that each character carries a consonant plus a neutral vowel "a", like Old Persian, but unlike it, Brahmi uses the same consonant with extra strokes to combine with different vowels.
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