A Shape That Held Its Form

This is one of the letters a palaeographer is glad to have. It is frequent enough in every period to give plenty of examples, and its Brahmi form is distinct enough from its neighbours that a worn specimen can usually still be told apart from them, which is not true everywhere in the script. Dating an undated inscription in India is done by comparing the shapes of common letters against inscriptions whose date is known from a named ruler or a regnal year, and the method depends entirely on having letters that are both common and unambiguous.

The letter is well attested in the Ashokan edicts and in the donative records of the following centuries at Sanchi, Bharhut and the western cave sites, and it can be followed through the Kushana and Gupta hands into both the northern and the southern branches of the family. That two-branch split is the main structural fact of Indian palaeography after the Mauryan period: the northern line runs through the Gupta script and Siddham towards Nagari, Sharada and the scripts of the Himalayan region, while the southern line produces the Grantha, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu and Sinhala alphabets and, by way of the Pallava chancery script, most of the writing systems of mainland and island Southeast Asia.