Frequent in the Formulas

The Ashokan edicts are formulaic in the way that official proclamations usually are. They open with a standard phrase naming the emperor by title, they repeat set expressions about what he has caused to be done and what he wishes his people to practise, and they close with instructions about the inscription itself. Those formulas recur across an empire and across two dozen sites, in several Middle Indo-Aryan dialects, and they are what makes the corpus tractable: a reader who has one edict has a good deal of every other.

This letter appears throughout that repeated material, which makes it one of the best attested signs in the earliest Brahmi and one of the most useful for dating a hand. It also makes it a good test of dialect. The edicts were cut in several different dialects across the empire and they differ from one another in regular ways, so the same formula in two places can show different treatments of the same inherited sound.

Comparing those versions is the earliest direct evidence for dialect variation anywhere in South Asia, and it was produced by accident: a chancery sending one text to many places, and local scribes rendering it in the language spoken there. No comparable body of evidence exists again for many centuries.