Type abugida Direction Right-to-left | Languages Gandhari Prakrit | |
 | ||
Time period 4th century BCE – 3rd century CE Parent systems Egyptian hieroglyphsProto-Sinaitic scriptPhoenician alphabetKharosthi Sister systems Brahmi scriptNabataean alphabetSyriac alphabetPalmyrene alphabetMandaic alphabetPahlavi scriptsSogdian alphabet Similar Devanagari, Gupta script, Cyrillic script | ||
The Kharosthi script, also spelled Kharoshthi or Kharoṣṭhī, is an ancient script used in ancient Gandhara (primarily modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan) to write the Gandhari Prakrit and Sanskrit. It was popular in Central Asia as well. An abugida, it was in use from the middle of the 3rd century BCE until it died out in its homeland around the 3rd century CE. It was also in use in Bactria, the Kushan Empire, Sogdia and along the Silk Road, where there is some evidence it may have survived until the 7th century in the remote way stations of Khotan and Niya. Kharosthi is encoded in the Unicode range U+10A00–U+10A5F, from version 4.1.0.
Contents
Form
Kharosthi is mostly written right to left (type A), but some inscriptions (type B) already show the left to right direction that was to become universal for the later South Asian scripts.
Each syllable includes the short /a/ sound by default, with other vowels being indicated by diacritic marks. Recent epigraphical evidence highlighted by Professor Richard Salomon of the University of Washington has shown that the order of letters in the Kharosthi script follows what has become known as the Arapacana alphabet. As preserved in Sanskrit documents, the alphabet runs:
a ra pa ca na la da ba ḍa ṣa va ta ya ṣṭa ka sa ma ga stha ja śva dha śa kha kṣa sta jñā rtha (or ha) bha cha sma hva tsa gha ṭha ṇa pha ska ysa śca ṭa ḍhaSome variations in both the number and order of syllables occur in extant texts.
Kharosthi includes only one standalone vowel sign which is used for initial vowels in words. Other initial vowels use the a character modified by diacritics. Using epigraphic evidence, Salomon has established that the vowel order is /a e i o u/, rather than the usual vowel order for Indic scripts /a i u e o/. That is the same as the Semitic vowel order. Also, there is no differentiation between long and short vowels in Kharosthi. Both are marked using the same vowel markers.
The alphabet was used in Gandharan Buddhism as a mnemonic for remembering a series of verses on the nature of phenomena. In Tantric Buddhism, the list was incorporated into ritual practices and later became enshrined in mantras.
Numerals
Kharosthi included a set of numerals that are reminiscent of Roman numerals. The symbols were I for the unit, X for four (perhaps representative of four lines or directions), ੭ for ten (doubled for twenty), and ʎ for the hundreds multiplier. The system is based on an additive and a multiplicative principle, but does not have the subtractive feature used in the Roman number system.
Note that the table beside reads right-to-left, just like the Kharosthi abugida itself and the displayed numbers.
History
The Kharosthi script was deciphered by James Prinsep (1799–1840) using the bilingual coins of the Indo-Greek Kingdom (obverse in Greek, reverse in Pali, using the Kharosthi script). This in turn led to the reading of the Edicts of Ashoka, some of which, from the northwest of South Asia, were written in the Kharosthi script.
Scholars are not in agreement as to whether the Kharosthi script evolved gradually, or was the deliberate work of a single inventor. An analysis of the script forms shows a clear dependency on the Aramaic alphabet but with extensive modifications to support the sounds found in Indic languages. One model is that the Aramaic script arrived with the Achaemenid Empire's conquest of the Indus River (modern Pakistan) in 500 BCE and evolved over the next 200+ years, reaching its final form by the 3rd century BCE where it appears in some of the Edicts of Ashoka found in northwestern part of South Asia. However, no intermediate forms have yet been found to confirm this evolutionary model, and rock and coin inscriptions from the 3rd century BCE onward show a unified and standard form. An inscription in Aramaic dating back to the 4th century BC was found in Sirkap, testifying to the presence of the Aramaic script in northwestern India at that period. According to Sir John Marshall, this seems to confirm that Kharoshthi was later developed from Aramaic.
The study of the Kharosthi script was recently invigorated by the discovery of the Gandhāran Buddhist texts, a set of birch bark manuscripts written in Kharosthi, discovered near the Afghan city of Hadda just west of the Khyber Pass in modern Pakistan. The manuscripts were donated to the British Library in 1994. The entire set of manuscripts are dated to the 1st century CE, making them the oldest Buddhist manuscripts yet discovered.
Unicode
Kharosthi was added to the Unicode Standard in March, 2005 with the release of version 4.1.
The Unicode block for Kharosthi is U+10A00–U+10A5F: