History · Ch 2 — Kings, Farmers and Towns — Early States and Economies
Deciphering Brahmi
Deciphering Brahmi
The story of how we came to read the earliest inscriptions in India is a detective story spanning decades. Most scripts used to write modern Indian languages — Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, and others — are ultimately derived from Brahmi, the script in which the majority of Ashoka’s inscriptions were carved. But for centuries, no one could read it.
European scholars, working from the late eighteenth century, began the task of decipherment. They were aided by Indian pandits who were experts in classical languages and scripts. The method was to work backwards: starting from contemporary manuscripts in Bengali and Devanagari (the script used for Hindi), they compared the shapes of modern letters with older specimens found on stone and copper. The assumption was that the older forms would gradually simplify into the newer ones.
A major obstacle slowed them down. Many early scholars assumed that the earliest inscriptions were written in Sanskrit, the classical language of elite learning. In reality, the earliest inscriptions — including Ashoka’s — were composed in Prakrit, a group of vernacular languages spoken by ordinary people. This mistaken assumption led scholars to try to fit the letters into the wrong linguistic framework, producing nonsense readings. …
Figure 2.10 shows a photograph of an Asokan inscription carved into a rock surface. The script visible is Brahmi, the ancestor of nearly all modern Indian writing systems. The inscription is not a single neat panel but a set of lines incised directly into the stone, running left to right. The letters are clear and well-spaced, typical of the careful work of Mauryan scribes.
The photograph is taken from a site where Ashoka’s edicts were placed — likely a major rock edict location such as Girnar (Gujarat), Dhauli (Odisha), or Shahbazgarhi (Pakistan), though the caption does not specify which. What matters is that the image lets you see the actual script that James Prinsep and earlier scholars struggled to read. The Brahmi letters look unfamiliar to a modern Hindi or Bengali reader, but the shapes are recognisably the ancestors of Devanagari and other scripts. …
Figure 2.11 is a simple but powerful two-column chart. On the left, it lists each letter of the Asokan Brahmi alphabet as it appears in the original third-century BCE inscriptions. On the right, directly beside each Brahmi character, is its equivalent in modern Devanagari — the script used for Hindi, Marathi, and Nepali today. The chart runs through the full set of vowels and consonants, pairing the ancient and modern forms so that a reader can see at a glance how the shapes have changed over two thousand years.
The purpose of this figure is to make visible the method of decipherment described in the textbook. European scholars and Indian pandits in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries did not have a Rosetta Stone for Brahmi. Instead, they worked backwards: they took the Devanagari script they already knew, compared its letter shapes with older manuscript forms, and then matched those against the still-older Brahmi letters found on Asokan pillars and rocks. The chart in Figure 2.11 is the end result of that painstaking process — a side-by-side key that shows exactly which Brahmi symbol corresponds to which Devanagari letter. …