84 A. F. R. Hoernle— On the date of the Bower Manuscript. [No. 2, 
Gupta alphabet. The general similarity of its letters to the Sarada 
probably shows, that the locality of its writing was somewhere in the 
extreme North-West of India, but its use of the ancient tridental form 
of YA shows that its date must be antecedent to the elaboration of the Sarada 
form of the North- Western alphabet. When this event took place, I shall 
now attempt to show. 
The old form (though not quite the oldest which was of the letter 
ya was cXf or cJV • It was made by two separate movements of the hand, 
one for drawing the left-hand perpendicular, the other for drawing the 
remaining portion of the letter. The next step was an attempt to draw 
the letter with one movement of the hand. This led to the contrivance 
of the form rdU , by which the end of the left-hand crook or loop was 
brought forward to the point of junction of the perpendicular and hori¬ 
zontal portions of the letter. It was now possible to draw the letter with 
one stroke of the pen, beginning with the top of the left-hand perpendi¬ 
cular, downwards; then round the loop, from left to right, to the bottom 
of the perpendicular; than finishing with the right-hand crook or angle. 
This change was clearly due to the convenience of cursive writing. But 
the tendency of cursive writing to quickness and economy of effort very 
soon led to a further change, which produced the form , by sever¬ 
ing the point of junction. This was the final form of the process ; it is 
still essentially the modern cursive form. The intermediate form , 
as I shall presently show, only existed for a comparatively very short 
time, and is essentially a mere transitional form. 
It is a well-accepted fact that cursive forms first make their appear¬ 
ance in manuscript writing, and may be, and generally are, in use in 
MS. writing some time before they are introduced in the inscribing of 
documents on stone, copper or other material. Such documents are of 
a conservative nature; they have a tendency to preserve old forms, after 
they have long disappeared from ordinary MS. writing. The common 
or exclusive use, in an ordinary MS., of a distinctly archaic form is, 
therefore, a safe means of determining its age. 
The old form of the letter ya was once current in all the alphabets of 
India. In all of them it gradually became displaced by some cursive form. 
But this displacement did not take place in all of them at the same point 
of time. In the South Indian alphabet it survived, at least in inscrip¬ 
tions, down to the twelfth century A. D.* The North-Eastern alphabet, 
# In the old Kanarese, where it much resembles the later Nepalese form with 
the ringlet attached to the left prong (see p. 85). See, e. g., the Eastern Chalukya 
inscription of 1134 A. D., in the Ind. Ant., vol. XIV, p. 50, or the Kakatiya inscrip¬ 
tion of 1162 A. D., ibid, XI, p. 9. It has now passed into the various modern 
cursive forms of the South-Indian alphabets. 
