Common on Stone From the Beginning

The aspirated stops survived the passage from Old to Middle Indo-Aryan largely intact, where a good deal else of the older sound system did not, so this letter is well represented in the Prakrit of the third century BCE rather than being a refinement added later when the script was adapted for Sanskrit. That matters for the palaeography: a letter attested in quantity in the earliest surviving material gives a scholar a firm starting point for the sequence of its shapes, which is exactly what the rarer letters of the vowel series cannot supply.

Middle Indo-Aryan in fact produced new aspirates of its own. A large class of inherited consonant clusters simplified by assimilating to a single doubled consonant, and where the cluster had contained a sibilant the result was frequently an aspirate, so words that show a cluster in Sanskrit show an aspirated stop in the Prakrit of the edicts. The correspondence is regular enough to be used in the other direction, and an editor reading a damaged inscription will often be able to say what the Sanskrit form behind a Prakrit word must have been. That relationship between the two stages of the language is one of the reasons the Ashokan material is studied as closely as it is, quite apart from what the edicts actually say.