The Story of Brahmi and its Decipherment - Part 5
Channel: Meherish Devaki
Date: 04/02/2020

The system of writing has been in existence in India from at least the Indus Valley civilization. The antiquity of Indus civilization (3300 BCE – 1300 BCE) is as old as the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations. While the hieroglyphics of Egypt and cuneiform scripts of Mesopotamia have been deciphered thanks to the discovery of multilingual Rosetta stone and Behistun inscription, the writings on the seals of the Indus Valley period have remained elusive to historians and epigraphists. However, the most ancient script of India that has been deciphered so far has been Brahmi, the mother of all the modern scripts of India. The story of how this script came to be deciphered and the impact it had is one that needs to be told.

Late 18th century and early 19th century India is particularly important to Indologists as it is during this period that the contours of India’s past gets drawn, chronology of its kings and emperors was being laid out, manuscripts were being collected, transcribed and translated, inscriptions were copied and published, and enquiries were made into all acts ‘performed by man or produced by nature’ by the British who came to work in India as employees of the East India Company. The theater of action for these scholarly debates and discussions were the Journals of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal and Asiatick Researches.

By the 19th century, the Brahmi script has become illegible to Indians. Arriving as an assay master to the Calcutta mint, James Prinsep would turn out to be the man who would decipher Brahmi and publish his findings in the Journals of the Royal Asiatic Society. Using ingenious analytical methods and brilliant intuitions, James Prinsep would open a new window to investigate India’s colourful past and most importantly rediscover India’s long forgotten emperor – Devanampiya Piyadasi Ashoka.

Drawing the material heavily from the journals and books of the 19th century, this talk will do a brief survey of system of writing in India, the breakthroughs made by James Prinsep and others to crack the Brahmi script and finally close with the impact of its decipherment to Indology.