130 A. F. R. Hoernle — Epigraphical Note on Palm-leaf, etc. [No. 2, 
persistent fasliion of shaping the writing material, even when it was 
birch-bark or paper. The people who used those leaves and thus initiated 
that fashion, must have been the first to learn and adopt the art of 
writing in India. The late Professor Biihler, in his excellent paper “ On 
the Origin of the Indian Brahmi Alphabet” {Indian Studies, No. Ill) 
and in his Indian Palaeography (Encyclopedia of Indo-Aryan Research, 
Chap. I, § 4), has shown it to be most probable that the Indian Brahmi 
script is derived from a Northern Semitic alphabet and he suggests that 
it probably came by way of Mesopotamia and the Persian Gfulf. I 
agree with Professor Biihler; only I believe the original of the Brahmi 
script to have been, not the Phenician alphabet of the 8th or 9th century 
B.C., but the Proto-Aramaean of the 7th or 6th century B.C. All the 
trustworthy evidence, at present available, points to the conclusion that 
the maritime commerce of India with the West cannot have commenced 
before the 7th century B.C., and that it ran from the west coast of 
India through the Persian Gulf to Mesopotamia. At that time, there 
existed a flourishing land-trade between Mesopotamia and the further 
West through the North of Arabia. The Indian sea- trade connected 
with this land-trade. The latter had a script, common to all the 
peoples that participitated in it, and it must have been this script with 
which the Indian merchants and mariners became acquainted in the 
7th and 6th centuries B.C. This script which may be called the Proto- 
Aramaean, was a cursive development of the Phenician, and owed its 
origin to the need of a popular short script by the side of the more 
cumbrous cuneiform. Further all available evidence seems to show 
that, though there probably existed a coasting-trade all along the west- 
coast of India to Ceylon, the Indian sea-trade to Mesopotamia started 
from the northern part of the west-coast, above Bombay, in the Gulf of 
Cambay, where the two ancient ports of Bharoch and Supara, already 
mentioned in the Jatakas, are situated. It is here, in the north- 
western part of Southern India that the Brahmi script must have 
originated, say, between 650 and 550 B.C. It was here that the 
Proto- Aramaean script was introduced by the Indian mariners, and 
elaborated into a new script by men belonging to the literary classes of 
India for the benefit, primarily, of the mercantile classes. These men 
would not have been slow to notice the advantage of the new importation, 
and they would naturally alter and enlarge it, and generally adapt it to the 
needs of their own language and literature. The details of this process 
of adaptation have been very well worked out by Professor Biihler in 
his papers above cited. But what I wish to point out is that the three 
principles on which Professor Biihler shows the adaptation to have been 
made are most easily accounted for, if we remember the nature of the 
