1897.] 
257 
Central Asian Manuscripts. 
succumbed, and later, under the early Mongol conquerors, in the 13th 
century, it partially revived in the Lamaitic form of Buddhism introduced 
from Tibet. This conservation of Buddhism, however, is not of any 
particular importance with regard to the question of the age of the 
Kuchar manuscripts. The early missionaries of the Buddhist faith were 
natives of Northern India, taking “ India ” in the wider usage of those 
times. They brought with them their Buddhist scriptures written in 
the Northern Indian characters, and when settled in Kuchar, naturally 
used those characters in their own compositions. Their converts, 
the natives of Kuchar, learned the use of those characters from their 
religious teachers. But in their hands they soon began to undergo a 
process of modification, which resulted in what I have called the 
Central Asian Brahmi, but which, perhaps, it may be better now to call 
the Kuchari, as I have not met with this alphabet in any manuscripts 
except those which came from Kuchar. 
The initial epoch of that process of modification it seems possible 
to fix with some probability, with the help of the evolution of the 
various forms of ya. I have already {ante, pages 216 and 217) explained 
the two divergent lines of this evolution in Northern India and Central 
Asia. The Northern Indian evolution commenced in the extreme portion 
of North-Western India (Panjab, Ka 9 mir, Gfandhara, i.e., the country 
of the Kushans), (say) about 350 A.D., by the introduction of the 
intermediate ya, and completed its course in the modern square ya 
throughout Northern India within little more than two centuries, i.e., 
about 600 A.D. From the same extreme portion of North-Western India 
the Brahmi alphabet, together with Buddhism, had been carried into 
Kuchar. With it naturally went the changes which from time to time 
took place in that alphabet. This is shown by the case of the Bower 
MS., and by Nos. Ill ab of the Fragments, all coming from Kuchar and 
thus showing that the fashion of writing the intermediate ya had been 
carried to Kuchar. Now it seems to me evident, that if the process of 
evolution of the Central Asian or Kuchari alphabet had not already 
fully set in before that period of the introduction of the intermediate 
ya , the influence of that intermediate ya and its resultant square ya 
would have shown itself in the formation of the Central Asian ya. 
But there is not the smallest trace of it. The evolution of the Central 
Asian ya has taken a different course, which proves that it must have 
begun at a time when the fashion of writing the intermediate ya had 
not yet begun, or at least had not yet become a settled fact in North- 
Western India. That means that the initial epoch of the evolution of 
the Central Asian cannot be well placed later than the fourth or fifth 
century A.D. Further, when once a native Kuchari style of writing 
