Brahmi was deciphered by James Prinsep, the secretary of the Society, in a series of scholarly articles in the Society's journal in the 1830s. The decipherment of Brahmi became the focus of European scholarly attention in the early 19th-century during East India Company rule in India, in particular in the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta. The earliest (indisputably dated) and best-known Brahmi inscriptions are the rock-cut edicts of Ashoka in north-central India, dating to 250–232 BCE. Sometime thereafter, the ability to read the original Brahmi script was lost. The writing system only went through relatively minor evolutionary changes from the Mauryan period (3rd century BCE) down to the early Gupta period (4th century CE), and it is thought that as late as the 4th century CE, a literate person could still read and understand Mauryan inscriptions. īrahmi is an abugida which uses a system of diacritical marks to associate vowels with consonant symbols. Its descendants, the Brahmic scripts, continue to be used today across Southern and Southeastern Asia.
You may need rendering support to display the uncommon Unicode characters in this article correctly.īrahmi ( / ˈ b r ɑː m i/ BRAH-mee 𑀩𑁆𑀭𑀸𑀳𑁆𑀫𑀻 ISO: Brāhmī) is a writing system of ancient India that appeared as a fully developed script in the 3rd century BCE.
