Brahmi script

**Brahmi** ( ; ; ISO: _Brāhmī_) is a writing system from ancient India that appeared as a fully developed script in the 3rd century BCE. Its descendants, the Brahmic scripts, continue to be used today across South and Southeastern Asia.

Brahmi is an abugida, a writing system that uses special marks to show vowels with consonants. The script changed only a little from the Mauryan period (3rd century BCE) to the early Gupta period (4th century CE). It is believed that even in the 4th century CE, a person who could read could still understand the old Mauryan writings. After that time, people eventually forgot how to read the original Brahmi script. The earliest and most famous Brahmi writings are the rock-cut edicts of Ashoka in north-central India, made between 250 and 232 BCE.

European scholars started focusing on how to read Brahmi in the early 1800s, during the time the East India Company ruled India, especially at the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta. Brahmi was finally deciphered by James Prinsep, who was the secretary of the Society. He wrote a series of articles about it in the Society's journal in the 1830s. His success was based on earlier work by Christian Lassen, Edwin Norris, H. H. Wilson, Alexander Cunningham, and others.

The origin of the script is still much debated, with most scholars stating that Brahmi was derived from or at least influenced by one or more contemporary Semitic scripts. Some scholars favour the idea of an indigenous origin or connection to the much older and as yet undeciphered Indus script but the evidence is insufficient at best.

Brahmi was once called the "pin-man" script in English because the letters looked like stick figures. It had many other names too, like "lath," "Laṭ," "Southern Aśokan," "Indian Pali," or "Mauryan." In the 1880s, Albert Étienne Jean Baptiste Terrien de Lacouperie, using an idea from Gabriel Devéria, linked it to the Brahmi script, which is the first script listed in the Lalitavistara Sūtra. After that, the name "Brahmi" became popular, especially in the important work of Georg Bühler, although he used the form "Brahma."

The Gupta script of the 5th century is sometimes called "Late Brahmi". From the 6th century onward, the Brahmi script diversified into numerous local variants, grouped as the Brahmic family of scripts. Dozens of modern scripts used across South and South East Asia have descended from Brahmi, making it one of the world's most influential writing traditions. One survey found 198 scripts that ultimately derive from it.

Among the inscriptions of Ashoka () written in the Brahmi script a few numerals were found, which have come to be called the Brahmi numerals. The numerals are additive and multiplicative and, therefore, not place value; it is not known if their underlying system of numeration has a connection to the Brahmi script. But in the second half of the 1st millennium CE, some inscriptions in India and Southeast Asia written in scripts derived from the Brahmi did include numerals that are decimal place value, and constitute the earliest existing material examples of the Hindu–Arabic numeral system, now in use throughout the world. The underlying system of numeration, however, was older, as the earliest attested orally transmitted example dates to the middle of the 3rd century CE in a Sanskrit prose adaptation of a lost Greek work on astrology.

## Origin of the name

Several divergent accounts of the origin of the name "Brahmi" (ब्राह्मी) appear in history. The term _Brahmi_ (बाम्भी in original) appears in Indian texts in different contexts.  According to the rules of the Sanskrit language, it is a feminine word meaning literally "of Brahma" or "the female energy of the Brahman". In popular Hindu texts such as the _Mahabharata_, it appears in the sense of a goddess, particularly for Saraswati as the goddess of speech and elsewhere as "personified Shakti (energy) of Brahma, the god of Hindu scriptures Veda and creation". Later Chinese Buddhist account of the 6th century CE also supports its creation to the god Brahma, though Monier Monier-Williams, Sylvain Lévi and others thought it was more likely to have been given the name because it was moulded by the Brahmins.

Alternatively, some Buddhist sutras such as the _Lalitavistara Sūtra_ (possibly 4th century CE), list _Brāhmī_ and _Kharoṣṭī_ as some of the sixty-four scripts the Buddha knew as a child. Several sutras of Jainism such as the _Vyakhya Pragyapti Sutra_, the _Samvayanga Sutra_ and the _Pragyapna Sutra_ of the Jain Agamas include a list of 18 writing scripts known to teachers before the Mahavira was born, the first one being _Bambhi_ (बाम्भी) in the original Prakrit, which has been interpreted as "Bramhi". The Brahmi script is missing from the list of 18 scripts in the surviving versions of two later Jaina Sutras, namely the _Vishesha Avashyaka_ and the _Kalpa Sutra_. Jain legend recounts that 18 writing scripts were taught by their first Tirthankara Rishabhanatha to his daughter Bambhi (बाम्भी); she emphasized बाम्भी as the main script as she taught others, and therefore the name Brahmi for the script comes after her name. There is no early epigraphic proof for the expression "Brahmi script". Ashoka himself when he created the first known inscriptions in the new script in the 3rd century BCE, used the expression _dhaṃma lipi_ (Prakrit in the Brahmi script: 𑀥𑀁𑀫𑀮𑀺𑀧𑀺, "Inscriptions of the Dharma") but this is not to describe the script of his own Edicts.

## Characteristics

Brahmi is usually written from left to right, as in the case of its descendants. However, an early coin found in Eran is inscribed with Brahmi running from right to left, as in Aramaic. Several other instances of variation in the writing direction are known, though directional instability is fairly common in ancient writing systems.

### Consonants

Brahmi is an abugida, meaning that each letter represents a consonant, while vowels are written with obligatory diacritics called _mātrā_s in Sanskrit, except when the vowels begin a word. When no vowel is written, the vowel  is understood. This "default short a" is a characteristic shared with Kharosthī, though the treatment of vowels differs in other respects.

### Conjunct consonants

Special conjunct consonants are used to write consonant clusters such as  or . In modern Devanagari the components of a conjunct are written left to right when possible (when the first consonant has a vertical stem that can be removed at the right), whereas in Brahmi characters are joined vertically downwards.

### Vowels

Vowels following a consonant are inherent or written by diacritics, but initial vowels have dedicated letters. There are three "primary" vowels in Ashokan Brahmi, which each occur in length-contrasted forms: /a/, /i/, /u/; long vowels are derived from the letters for short vowels. There are also four "secondary" vowels that do not have the long-short contrast, /e:/, /ai/, /o:/, /au/. Note though that the grapheme for /ai/ is derivative from /e/ in a way that parallels the short-long contrast of the primary vowels (historically they were /ai/ and /a:i/). However, there are only nine distinct vowel diacritics, as short  is understood if no vowel is written. The initial vowel symbol for /au/ is also apparently lacking in the earliest attested phases, even though it has a diacritic. Ancient sources suggest that there were either 11 or 12 vowels enumerated at the beginning of the character list around the Ashokan era, probably adding either _aṃ_ or _aḥ_. Later versions of Brahmi add vowels for four syllabic liquids, short and long /ṛ/ and /ḷ/. Chinese sources indicate that these were later inventions by either Nagarjuna or Śarvavarman, a minister of King Hāla.

It has been noted that the basic system of vowel marking common to Brahmi and Kharosthī, in which every consonant is understood to be followed by a vowel, was well suited to Prakrit, but as Brahmi was adapted to other languages, a special notation called the _virāma_ was introduced to indicate the omission of the final vowel. Kharoṣṭhī also differs in that the initial vowel representation has a single generic vowel symbol that is differentiated by diacritics, and long vowels are not distinguished.

The collation order of Brahmi is believed to have been the same as most of its descendant scripts, one based on Shiksha, the traditional Vedic theory of Sanskrit phonology. This begins the list of characters with the initial vowels (starting with _a_), then lists a subset of the consonants in five phonetically related groups of five called _vargas_, and ends with four liquids, three sibilants, and a spirant. Thomas Trautmann attributes much of the popularity of the Brahmic script family to this "splendidly reasoned" system of arrangement.

### Punctuation

Punctuation can be perceived as more of an exception than as a general rule in Asokan Brahmi. For instance, distinct spaces in between the words appear frequently in the pillar edicts but not so much in others. ("Pillar edicts" refers to the texts that are inscribed on the stone pillars oftentimes with the intention of making them public.)  The idea of writing each word separately was not consistently used.

## Descendants

Over the course of a millennium, Brahmi developed into numerous regional scripts. Over time, these regional scripts became associated with the local languages. A Northern Brahmi gave rise to the Gupta script during the Gupta Empire, sometimes also called "Late Brahmi" (used during the 5th century), which in turn diversified into a number of cursives during the Middle Ages, including the Siddhaṃ script (6th century) and Śāradā script (9th century).

Southern Brahmi gave rise to the Grantha alphabet (6th century), the Vatteluttu alphabet (8th century), and due to the contact of Hinduism with Southeast Asia during the early centuries CE, also gave rise to the Baybayin in the Philippines, the Javanese script in Indonesia, the Khmer alphabet in Cambodia, and the Old Mon script in Burma.

## Infobox (writing system)

- **name**: Brahmi
- **altname**: _Brāhmī_
- **sample**:
- **caption**: Brahmi script on Pillars of Ashoka, Ashoka Pillar in Sarnath ()
- **type**: Abugida
- **languages**: Sanskrit, Pali, Prakrit, Saka language, Saka, Old Uyghur,
Tocharian languages, Tocharian, Tamil language, Tamil, Elu
- **time**: At least by the 3rd century BCE to 5th century CE
- **fam1**: Egyptian hieroglyphs
- **fam2**: Proto-Sinaitic script
- **fam3**: Phoenician alphabet
- **fam4**: Aramaic alphabet
- **sisters**: Kharosthi
- **children**: *Gupta script, Gupta
**Siddham script, Siddham
***Nagari script
****Devanagari script
****Kaithi script
****Gujarati script
***Gaudi script
****Bengali–Assamese script
**Sharada script, Sharada
***Laṇḍā script
****Gurumukhi script
****Khudabadi script
****Mahajani script
**Tibetan script, Tibetan
**Kalinga script, Kalinga
**Bhaiksuki script, Bhaiksuki
*Tamil-Brahmi
**Pallava script, Pallava
***Khmer script
***Tamil script
***Grantha script, Grantha
****Malayalam script
**Vatteluttu
*Kadamba script, Kadamba
**Telugu-Kannada script
***Kannada script
***Telugu script
*Sinhala script, Sinhala
*Tocharian script, Tocharian
- **unicode**: [https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U11000.pdf U+11000–U+1107F]
- **iso15924**: Brah