66 



of the great king, as well as the neighbouring people of Af- 

 ghanistan, of the ability to read the ordinances thus inscribed 

 for their information and observance; — and that ability indicated 

 a familiarity with writings on more perishable substances than 

 rocks and stately monoliths, — a familiarity which, considering the 

 fixity of Indian habits and grooves of thought, could not possibly 

 have been attained to in the course of a single generation.* 



The notion, founded on the assertions of the old Sinhalese 



* " No inscriptions have been met with in India anterior to the rise of Buddhism . 

 The earliest authentic specimens of writing are the inscriptions of king Priya- 

 darsi or Asuka, about 250 b. c. These are written in two different alphabets. 

 The alphabet which is found in the inscription of Kapurdigiri, and which in the 

 main is the same as that of the Arianian coins, is written from right to left. It 

 is clearly of Semitic origin, and most closely connected with the Aramaic branch 

 of the old Semitic or Phenician alphabet. The Aramaic letters, however, which 

 we know from Egyptian and Palmyrenian inscriptions, have experienced further 

 changes since they served as the model for the alphabet of Kapurdigiri, and we 

 must have recourse to the more primitive types of the ancient Hebrew coins and of 

 the Phenician inscriptions, in order to explain some of the letters of the Kapur- 

 digiri alphabet. 



" But while the transition of the Semitic types into this ancient Indian alphabet 

 can be proved with scientific precision, the second Indian alphabet, that which is 

 found in the inscription of Girnar, and which is the real source of all other Indian 

 alphabets, as well as of those of Tibet and Burmah, has not as yet been traced 

 back in a satisfactory manner to any Semitic prototype. (Prinsep's Indian 

 Antiquities by Thomas, vol. ii. p. 42.) To admit, however, the independent 

 invention of a native Indian alphabet is impossible. Alphabets were never 

 invented, in the usual sense of that word. They were formed gradually, and 

 purely phonetic alphabets always point back to earlier, syllabic or ideographic 

 stages. There are no such traces of the growth of an alphabet in Indian soil ; 

 and it is to be hoped that new discoveries may still bring to light the intermediate 

 links by which the alphabet of Girnar, and through it the modern Devanagari, 

 may be connected with one of the leading Semitic alphabets." — Prof. Max 

 Midler's Sanskrit Grammar, 1866. pp. 1-2. 



