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SUMMARY

In this paper a new label inscription is reported from Muthupat@t@i near Madurai, Tamil Nadu. The inscription is found in a cavern along with some known Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions. The new inscription refers to a man from a village/town called KARUPU#R.

In another inscription in the same cavern, the letter E is inscribed in the form of an equilateral triangle symmetrically placed like a pyramid. The authors consider it to be an early form of the letter.

The paper also discusses some questions on the origin of the Brahmi script.

In the first part of the paper we report  a newly found Tamil-Brahmi inscription from the Madurai region and in the second part we put forward a new hypothesis on the development of the Brahmi script.

1. A  NEW  TAMIL- BRAHMI  INSCRIPTION

Many label inscriptions^1,2,3 have been noted in natural caverns in the hills near Madurai,  which was once the capital city of the Pandya kings. We are concerned here with a natural cavern on a hill which is within the limits of Muthupat@t@i village which is very close to the campus of Madurai-Kamaraj University. Three Tamil inscriptions in the Tamil-Brahmi script have been noted so far and we report here another inscription from the same site. Adjoining the main cavern there is a small cavern with a bed and on the outer side of the stone-bed is found an inscription which reads as

KA RU#PUR CE#Y CI R@ @I KAN@ @

Alternative readings are possible. CE#Y may be read as CEY. It means either red ⁷ or 'do/doing'. The penultimate letter may be read as KA# instead of Ka.

On one of the beds in the main cavern there is a partly damaged inscription which has already been noted ⁸. One of the signs missed by earlier scholars in that inscription is a neat little equilateral triangle placed symmetrically like a pyramid with two angles at the bottom and the third at the top. This is an early form of the letter E and this form⁹ is present in the famous Mahasthan stone-plaque inscription which some scholars assign to pre-Asokan days. This leads us to the question of the relationship between Tamil-Brahmi and Asokan-Brahmi scripts which we shall discuss in the following section.

2. THE  ORIGIN  AND  DEVELOPMENT  OF THE  BRAHMI  SCRIPT

We use the  word Brahmi to include the Asokan Brahmi, the Tamil Brahmi and the Bhattiprolu scripts. While we have been fascinated by the known  Brahmi inscriptions, we have also been able to locate three new Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions^{10 ,11,12} and we were able to locate a pulli in one of the early Tamil inscriptions.¹³.

In 1977 we¹⁴ put forward the theory that Brahmi was invented and such an idea did not find universal acceptance at that time. However in 1979 a book¹⁵ appeared taking up as its main theme the question of invention of the Brahmi script as against the theory of evolution. Today many scholars are receptive to the idea that Brahmi is a carefully designed script and that it is not the result of any haphazard evolution over centuries. Very few would hold the view that Brahmi was borrowed from some European or West Asian script. What is interesting is that many scholars of repute hold on to their cherished views and one of them is that Brahmi evolved from the Harappan script. Again some hold the view that the Indus people were Dravidians and others that they were Indo-Aryan. Some kind of evidence which is convincing to one scholar is not so convincing to another scholar but scholars are allowed to stick to their own views.

We had earlier put forth the theory that Brahmi was a carefully designed script and that the symbols were derived from two or three symmetric geometric designs. The first is a design with a cross superimposed on a square and the second is a vertical line superimposed on a circle. Both these symbols are found in the caverns around Madurai along with the Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions.

In this paper we take a fresh look at the Asokan-Brahmi and Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions. We find that there are many symbols in common to both and that there are many symbols which are exclusively in use in one of the two kinds of inscriptions. What is most remarkable is that the signs that are common to both have similar sound values. It therefore follows that either they are indebted to a common parent script or one was developed out of the other. It has been held by many scholars that Tamil-Brahmi was a later development of Asokan-Brahmi.

We wish to examine in this paper an alternative hypothesis that Asokan Brahmi was developed out of the Tamil-Brahmi script. This hypothesis is not startlingly new and T.N.Subramanian proposed in 1954 that Brahmi was originally meant for a language like Tamil.¹⁶ However we shall not follow the lines of his argument.

We wish to propose the hypothesis that the oldest of the Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions belong to the pre-Asokan period and they influenced the development of the Asokan-Brahmi script, which is a later development.

Is there any evidence to support such a hypothesis? First we note that there are fewer symbols in the Tamil-Brahmi script compared to the Asokan-Brahmi script. Asokan-Brahmi is an elaboration of a smaller set of Tamil-Brahmi symbols. The letter PHA was obviously designed after the letter PA by adding a curl to the sign which is like a mirror image of J (without the top horizontal bar). Other things being equal a more elaborate system is a later development of a less elaborate system.

 Iravatham Mahadevan¹⁷ has pointed out that the existence of three orthographic systems of writing followed in the Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions. These systems are different from the Asokan-Brahmi system. There is another system called the Bhattiprolu system which is different from the Asokan-Brahmi and is closer to the Tamil-Brahmi systems. The Asokan Brahmi inscriptions follow a single orthographic system even though the shapes of some of the letters vary from writer to writer. Here we wish to make use of a principle used in the Life Sciences, to fix the original home of a plant or an animal spread over a vast area. When the same kind of plant is found all over the world, certain criteria are used to fix the original site from which the plant eventually spread. The first objective criterion is this. If many related species are found in the wild in one region of the world then that region is taken to be the original site of the plant even though it may be found extensively in many parts of the world. If we apply this objective criterion to the area of ancient scripts, Tamil Nadu should be acknowledged to be the original home of the Brahmi script which later developed into Asokan Brahmi and Bhattiprolu scripts. One may wonder whether this methodology is applicable to the area of scripts. We can verify it by looking at the Grantha script¹⁸ used in Thailand. The original home of the Grantha script is South India and many varieties of the script are found here. The objective scientific criterion is certainly applicable in this case.

A second objective criterion used in the Life Sciences is to assign an area as the original home of a plant if that area harbours a more primitive, wild variety of the plant. For instance chillies were introduced into India less than 500 years ago. Wild chillies are found in the American continent and South America is found to be original home of the chilli plant. Let us apply this objective principle to the field of epigraphy. It is certainly valid if we again choose the example of the Grantha script from Thailand. The original home of these scripts is Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh where we can find the earlier forms of the script. Let us apply this principle to the study of the Brahmi script. We shall look at the three orthographic systems of writing Brahmi in Tamil Nadu. We shall call these systems, the Tamil-Brahmi system, the Brahmi system and the Tamil Pulli system. In the Tamil-Brahmi system the consonant signs stand for the pure consonants (or the closed forms). A vowel is added to the consonant by either printing a pure vowel next to the consonant or the consonant is modified by a stroke attached to the pure consonant symbol. For instance the cross sign represents K and the cross with a horizontal stroke on the top right hand side denotes KA; a horizontal stroke at the bottom right hand side denotes KU, a stroke at the top left side denotes KE and so on. This is a logical system. All the vowels are denoted by the same principle and the vowel A does not get any special treatment. This is a logical system and it is more basic than the Asokan-Brahmi system. In the Asokan-Brahmi system we recall that a cross sign stands for K+A. A vertical stroke on the top right side makes it KI. It is clear that the Asokan system is not as primitive or logical as the Tamil-Brahmi system. The fact that there exists a system of writing Tamil which is more logical and more basic than the Asokan system supports our hypothesis that Tamil-Brahmi is more ancient than Asokan-Brahmi.

In the second orthographic system found in Tamil Nadu a cross K with a horizontal stroke on the top right hand side is read as KA. The cross alone is read as KA as in the Asokan-Brahmi system. The cross is also read as K, the pure consonant. In the Asokan-Brahmi if a pure consonant like K were to be followed by a letter like YA then Y is written below K and a compound letter KYA is formed indicating that the top sign denotes a pure consonant. This system is not followed in any of the orthographic systems of Tamil-Brahmi. In the Asokan-Brahmi system there is no way of denoting unambiguously the occurrence of a pure consonant (except M) at the end of a sentence. The third system of writing Tamil-Brahmi is what we call the Tamil Pulli system and it is mentioned in Tolkappiam, one of the most ancient Tamil works on grammar. In this system every letter is represented in an unambiguous manner. A pure consonant is denoted by a dot or pulli which is also used to denote a short E as well as the short 0. This simple versatile unambiguous system is superior to the other systems.

On the basis of the occurrence of stylus-like objects in excavations,  Soundararajan has proposed¹⁹ that the date of Panini be pushed back to around 1000 B.C. Following this trend we have pushed back the date of early Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions to pre-Asokan days !

When we look at the history of the development of theories on the origin of the Brahmi script, we find an interesting pattern. At first, European scholars who were familiar with the civilizations of West Asia and Europe tried to link Brahmi with the European and Semitic scripts. Later during this century we have a band of scholars who are quite familiar with the Mauryan civilization and who are familiar with Sanskrit and Prakrit and who have taken it for granted that the origins of Brahmi have to be found in the Gangetic area. We have merely proposed here another theory which is different from the earlier accepted theories!

Notes

1. Iravatham Mahadevan, 'Corpus of the Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions', in (R. Nagaswamy, ed.) Seminar on Inscriptions, Madras, 1966, pp. 57-73.
2. T.V. Mahalingam, South Indian Paleography, Madras, 1970.
3. R. Nagaswamy et al, Kalvettiyal (Tamil), Madras, 1972.
4. N.Subrahmanian, Pre-Pallavan Tamil Index, Madras, 1966.
5. N.Karashima et al, Concordance of Names in the Chola Inscriptions, Madurai, 1978.
6. Pre-Pallavan Tamil Index. The author interprets the word SE#YON as the Red One but rejects the alternative meaning Young One.
7. T. Burrow and M.B.Emeneau, Dravidian Etymological  Dictionary, Oxford, 1961.
8. Kalvettiyal  records three label inscriptions. We are concerned here with the penultimate letter E of the third inscription.
9. S.P.Gupte and K.S.Ramachandran (eds.), The Origin of the Brahmi Script, Delhi, 1979, p.35.
10. Gift Siromoney and E. Jebarajan, 'A new Tamil-Brahmi inscription', The Sunday Standard, Madras, August 13, 1978.
11. Gift Siromoney, 'Another new Tamil-Brahmi inscription', The Sunday Standard, Madras, March 11, 1979.
12. Muthupat@t@i inscription reported in this paper.
13. Emmanuel Jebarajan and Gift Siromoney, "On the occurrence of the Pulli in the Tamil-Brahmi inscription of Anairnalai", in New Dimensions in the Study of Tamil Culture, Palayamkottai, 1978.
14. Gift Siromoney and M.Lockwood, "The invention of the Brahmi script", Madras Christian College Magazine, XLVI (1977), pp. 31-33; Souvenir of the Fourth Annual Congress of the Epigraphical Society of India, Madras 1978, pp.42-50.
15. The Origin of the Brahmi Script.
16. T.N.Subramaniam, South Indian Temple Inscriptions, Vol III, Part II, Madras 1957, p.1609. He not only says that Brahmi owes its origin to Tamil-Brahmi but also that Prakrit language also owes its development to Tamil.

The earliest inscriptions found in the Tamil country are in the Brahmi script of circa third century B.C This Brahmi script should have been designed for a Dravidian language, very likely Tamil which was the oldest and primary language of the group and later on adopted for Prakrit when it was evolved, synthesizing the Dravidian languages and was made the common language of the whole country.