.56 Annual Address. [Feb. 



of the Indian Museum. Since then they have been found, for example, 

 in an inscription of the Pabhosa cave which was discovered in 

 1887 by Mr. J. Cockburn of the Opium Department,'* in another found 

 in the same year by the late Kaviraj Syamal Das near Nagari 

 in Me war, and in the curious copper-plate, discovered by Dr. Hoey 

 in 1894 at Sohgaura in the G5rakh pur District.*^ The name " A9oka 

 character " was, therefore, found very misleading and inconvenient. 

 Hence, seeing that A9oka belonged to the Maurya dynasty, the 

 term " Maurya characters " or " Maurya script " has now generally 

 been adopted. This Maurya script is the lineal ancestor of the modern 

 Northern Indian scripts, notably of the best known among them, 

 the Nagari or Devanagari. There are few things so interesting 

 in archaeology as the history, with all its concomitant details, of the 

 evolution of the modern scripts of Northern India. But unfortunately, 

 till recently, the absence of a good text-book on the subject was felt 

 to be a great hindrance. A very creditable attempt to supply this 

 want was made by a native scholar Gaurishankar Hirachand Ojha of 

 Udaipar in his Palseography of India, published in 1894. But still more 

 was required, and this has now been supplied by Hofrath Prof. G. Biihler 

 of Vienna, who is facile princeps in all matters appertaining to Indian 

 epigraphy and palaeography. His excellent and exhaustive Indian 

 Palseography was published in 1897, and forms a portion of the 

 Encyclopaedia of Indo- Aryan Research, which is being brought out under 

 his general editorship, and which will present a summary of everything 

 that modern research has established in the domains of Indian philology 

 and archaeology. The name Brahmi has been adopted by him as a 

 general term for all the Northern Indian types of alphabet. A cursory 

 survey of these types will show that their evolution has produced a very 

 marked change in the form of the letters about the middle of the fourth 

 century A.D. The oldest type of the preceding period is represented 

 by the Maurya script of the time of A9oka. The oldest type of the 

 second great period — that type with which this period commences — is 

 what is known as the " Gupta characters." This script is called so 

 because it is used by the kings of the Gupta dynasty who reigned in the 

 fourth and fifth centuries A.D., first in Pataliputra or Patna and after- 

 wards either in Ko9ambi or in Ayodhya,^^ and whose empire was 



1* Published by Mr. Cockburn in our Journal, Vol. LVI, p. 31, by myself in the 

 Proceedings As. Soc. Beng., for 1887, p. 103 and by Dr. Fiihrer in the Epigraphia 

 Jndica, Vol. II, p. 242. 



IB Published by Dr. Hoey, Mr. Smith, and myself in our Proceedings for 1894, 

 p. 84, and by Hofrath Prof. Biihler in the Vienna Oriental Journal, Vol. X, p. 138. 



W See Mr. V. A. Smith, in Journal, Royal Asiatic Society, for 1897, p. 910. 



