SIMILARITY OF THE TIBETAN TO THE KASHGAR-BRAHMI ALPHABET. 45 



article. It seems to be perfectly impossible to discover an ancient Indian alphabet injthe 

 vicinity of Udyana|which exhibits traces of a closer resemblance to the Tibetan alphabet 

 than the Wartu and Lanthsa characters, although it is possible to reconstruct a list of 

 ancient Indian Brahmi characters (or ' development of the Brahmi characters') taken from 

 various monuments erected at different times and places, which contains prototypes of 

 most Tibetan characters. What is of special interest with regard to the Kashgar-Brah- 

 mi characters is, that in this case a whole alphabet of one time and place can be readily 

 compared with the Tibetan alphabet. 



Tibetan scholars will have to learn many lessons from sand -buried Turkestan. One 

 of the very strangest is this, that at the time of the Endere inscriptions, the classical 

 language was already an archaic language. It will be well not to take the Tibetan histo- 

 rians too literallv. 



