The art of writing, we owe it to our ancestors. Their inventions and methodologies have led to so many revolutions.
The development in writing from pictorial to words, from clay tablets to paper is something we all should be indebted to our older generations. The early writings of Indus Valley Civilisation or Harappan Civilisation dating to back to 2600-1900 BC are found on seals, but unfortunately, they have not been deciphered. The inscriptions that could be deciphered date back to the Ashokan Era (third century BC). The Brahmi script, as found in the earliest records, give us a reflection of theories of Indian Grammarians.
As India stepped into the sixth century BC, it is found that kings started issuing coins with their pictorial marks, which usually represented the meaning of the king’s name. During the Mauryan period, a script called ‘Kharosthi’ was in use, most predominantly in the Northwest region of India. During the early 5th century BC, the Achaemenid Persians, took control over Indus and brought along the Aramaic script and language, for communication. For written records, a north semitic script was used, the adaption of which is Kharosthi. The characters in this script were cursive.
Then we have the Gupta script used during the Gupta empire. This script was a descendent of Brahmi script and eventually gave rise to Sarada, Nigari and Siddham scripts. This script also was used for writing Sanskrit.
The Sarada script eventually evolved into Gurmukhi script and Kashmiri script. The Nagari is the ascendent of the Devanagari script. This script was used to write Sanskrit as well as Prakrit. The Nagari script also branched off into other scripts such as Bengali, Tibetan, etc.
Isn’t this mind boggling? And the list is still not complete. It is truly amazing to know about the various scripts used to record history. It is fascinating, and hope we learn more about our roots and scripts, and they do not get lost in modern India.
More to come!