1838.] rocks of Girnar in Gujerat.and Dhauli in Cuttach. 275 



ten bl IT] ; and exactly the same structure is retained in the square 

 Pali alphabet or stone letter of Barma, except that the stroke in the 

 centre is contracted into a dot, joj ; further they are merely round- 

 ed in the modern Burmese for the facility of writing, & ^. In no 

 other alphabets that I know of are the analogies to the original type so 

 faithfully preserved as to shew that these two sibilants were originally 

 the same letter reversed in position, a mode frequently adopted, as I 

 have had occasion to notice before, in Indian alphabets to represent 

 slight modifications in sound, (see vol. VI. p. 475-6.) 



The most ancient Sanskrit form, however, of the talibasA is one I have 

 just discovered on a genuine inscription of the time of Chandragupta, 

 where it is written CD and OO^ This type is evidently the original of 

 the form so common on early Hindu coins and inscriptions, 21 > whence are 

 directly descended the Tibetan £\, the Bengali *t, and the modern Nagari 

 ■?r, which heretofore presented a kind of anomaly in the derivation of our 

 alphabetical symbols. 



Having thus recovered the complete, and as I consider it the prime- 

 val alphabet of the Indian languages, I have arranged in the accom- 

 panying plate the changes each letter has undergone in successive cen- 

 turies, as deduced from absolute records on copper or stone. The table 

 furnishes a curious species of palaeographic chronometer, by which any 

 ancient monument may be assigned with considerable accuracy to the 

 period at which it was written even though it possess no actual date- 



I begin with the sixth century before the Christian era, — because 

 I suppose that the alphabet which we possess, as used by the buddhists 

 of a couple of centuries later, was that in which their sacred works had 

 been written by the contemporaries of Buddha himself, who died in 

 the year 543 B. C. 



What in some measure confirms this hypothesis is, that the Sanskrit 

 character of the third century before Christ, (of which I have intro- 

 duced a specimen in the plate from the genuine document above allud- 

 ed to*,) differs only so much from the original form as the habits of a 

 class of writers distinct in religion and more refined in language might 

 naturally introduce : — just as we afterwards find an equal degree of 

 modification from the type of As oka's time, in the Sanskrit alphabet of 

 five centuries later, on the pillars. 



The Asoka alphabet (the Sanskrit one) agrees very closely with that 

 of our Surashtra coins, which may thence be pronounced to be ante- 

 rior to the Gupta series. The Gujerat plates dated in the third century 

 of the samvat era, differ but little from the Allahabad pillar or Samudra- 

 * 1 hope to be able to insert an account of this inscription in my next journal, 



