1921.] The Svastika and the Omkara. 241 
were consulted in this work of reconstruction. The Brahmi 
script, as we find it about 500 B.C., bears in its elaboration 
an evident impress of the academician’s hand,—a fact admit- 
ted by Bithler.! We do not know how much may have been 
due to ‘the learned Brahmans’ in the framing of the script. 
But it seems to me that they were intellectually quite equal 
to the task of devising, at any rate, some letters independently 
themselves. It is in any case manifest that the theory of a 
late and Semitic origin of the Brahmi script carries with itself 
its own burden of proof, and that burden is as yet far from 
may well have been the case that contemporary foreign models 
B 
500 B.C.). Ordinarily, in the post-Asokan period, we find a 
progressive palaeographic change in Indian scripts through 
successive centuries. The letter o itself has changed consider- 
ably since the days of Asoka. Could it have remained muc 
the same 500 B.C. as 1500 B.C.? This, I submit, is quite 
‘ within the limits of possibility. As Prof., Bhandarkar * Says ; 
ee = a 
do we not find that the letter g, ¢.9- of the inscription on the 
relic-casket of the Piprahwa Stupa which may be ascribed to 
about 500 B.C. has survived in that exact form to this day in 
the modern Kanarese script ?”” The Brahmi ietters employed in 
Ceylon inscriptions in the first century B.C. are almost ss 
with those prevailing two or three hundred years earlier.’ In 
Kharosthi palaeography, again, we do not 
a few letters, any radical change between Asoka and 
It is well known, too, that the Tibetan script has remained 
stationary since the eighth century A.D., with only a few slight 
changes.* Possibly, these latter instances of stagnation illus- 
sy w and develop when 
mind that palaeographic progress 18 
in those remote ages than in 
writing was presumably less extens 
bib eedee 
Pio oS 
| Ind. Palaeog. (Eng.), p- 17- é Ep. Ind., xi p. 271. 
I 
3 Parker, Ancient Ceylon, p- 445 
