Origin Attested from the third century BCE, the same edicts of Ashoka that carry Brahmi elsewhere in the empire; it had fallen out of use by roughly the third century CE.
Kharosthi is one of the two earliest scripts attested on the Indian subcontinent, used in the third century BCE for Ashoka's edicts in the northwest of the Mauryan empire, the same period in which the rest of the empire wrote in Brahmi instead. Unlike Brahmi, whose own origin remains a genuinely open scholarly question, Kharosthi's descent from the Aramaic script of the Achaemenid administration is well established: it was adapted in Gandhara, in what is now northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan, to write the local Gandhari Prakrit. It went on to carry some of the oldest surviving Buddhist manuscripts known, birch bark scrolls recovered from the same region, before falling out of use by around the third century CE.
Facts
Origins
Origin PeriodAttested from the third century BCE, the same edicts of Ashoka that carry Brahmi elsewhere in the empire; it had fallen out of use by roughly the third century CE. 1 Place of OriginGandhara, in the northwest of the Mauryan empire, in what is now northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan. 1 Attributions
TraditionUsed for Gandhari and other languages of the northwest Indian subcontinent, notably for early Buddhist manuscripts such as the Gandharan Buddhist texts. 1 Identity
Script TypeAn abugida written right to left, derived from the Aramaic abjad. 1 Script type (class) Connections
Associated With
Carried some of the oldest surviving Buddhist manuscripts known, the Gandharan birch bark scrolls written in Gandhari Prakrit.
Source Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan LanguagesRichard Salomon
Related To
The two earliest attested scripts of the Indian subcontinent, in contemporary use in neighboring regions of the Mauryan empire; Brahmi's own letter Nya notes that the northwest wrote in Kharosthi instead.
Source Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan LanguagesRichard Salomon
Sources
1. Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages
Richard Salomon, Oxford University Press, 1998on Kharosthi and its classification as an abugidaView the Source Reader Challenges (0)
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