3898.] Annual Address. 69 



India during the fifth, and perhaps in the sixth, century B.C. The 

 Brahmi script, like the English, runs from the left to right, while the 

 Phenician script, like the Hebrew, used to run from the right to the 

 left. If Hofrath Prof. Biihler's theory is correct, one may expect to find 

 in India some evidence of the change of the direction in writino*. 

 Curiously enough such evidence does exist. A coin has been found by 

 the late Major-General Sir A. Cunningham'^* in Eran, in the Central 

 Provinces, which clearly exhibits a legend in Brahmi cliaracters 

 running from the right to the left. It is probably of about the same 

 age as the A9oka edicts, that is, about the third century B.C. ; and 

 as these edicts themselves occasionally show single letters placed in 

 that reversed direction, it becomes very probable from these isolated 

 survivals that the great change of the direction in writing the Brahmi 

 characters took place in India in the course of the fourth century B.C. 

 I may here mention another discovery made by myself, which cor- 

 roborates the Indian tendency of changing the direction of writing. 

 By the side of the Brahmi characters, there was another, quite distinct 

 script in use in India at the time of king A9oka. This is the 

 so-called Bactrian or Arian-Pali, or as it is now called the Kharosthi 

 script. Its use was limited to North-Western India, from the Panjab 

 westwards, while through the whole of India eastwards and southwards 

 the Brahmi script, in some one or other of its varieties, was current. 

 Hofrath Prof. Biihler has shown ^^ that this secondary Indian script is of 

 somewhat later date than the Brahmi, that it arose from an Aramean 

 alphabet used in Persia in the sixth century B.C., and that it spread into 

 India only in the fifth, or perhaps even as late as the fourth century B.C. 

 It is a script, which like its source, the Aratnean, runs from the right to 

 the left ; and it is foutid written in that fashion in the Ayoka edicts and 

 all other inscriptions. There is only one exception, namely two coins 

 of the Indo-Parthian king Abdagases who probably reigned in the 

 first century B.C. in the regions about the Indus. They were obtained 

 by Mr. J. A. Bourdillon from the Gaja Bazar, and I discovered on 

 them a legend in the Kharosthi characters, but running from the left 

 to the right.^s ^^}^is shows that a process of change in the direction 

 of writing those characters was beginning to spring up in India in the first 

 century B.C. ; and it is not impossible that the change might have,, 

 in the course of time, fully established itself within the borders of India 

 just as it did in the case of the Brahmi alphabet, but for the eircum- 



2* Published by him in his Goirbs of Ancient India, p. 101, Plate XI, fi^. 18. 

 26 See his paper in the Vienna Oriental Journal, Vol. IX, p. 44. 

 26 Published by me in our Proceedings, for May 1895, and in our Journal, Vol.. 

 LXVI, Part I, (for 1897), p. 139, Plate VI, figs. 7 and 8. 



