|
The earliest traces of epigraphy in South Asia are found in the undeciphered inscriptions of the Indus Valley Civilization (Indus script), which date back to the early 3rd millennium BC. Two other important archeological classes of symbols are found from the 1st millennium BCE, Megalithic Graffiti Symbols and symbols on punch-marked coins, though most scholars do not consider these to constitute fully linguistic scripts, and their semiotic functions are not well understood. The earliest deciphered epigraphic inscriptions of significant length are the Edicts of Ashoka of the 3rd century BCE, written in forms of Prakrit in the Brahmi script. Jain inscriptions in Sri Lanka and South India written in Tamil-Brahmi, Bhattiprolu alphabet and the Kadamba alphabet are also of relatively early date, though not as old as the Ashoka inscriptions. Short Brahmi inscriptions on potsherds from the 4th century BCE have been reported from the ruins of Anuradhapura and are the only pre-Ashokan examples of Brahmi that have received any scholarly acceptance, though reports have appeared in the Indian press claiming potsherd inscriptions from an even earlier period (6th to 4th century BCE). Writing in Sanskrit (Epigraphical Hybrid Sanskrit, EHS) appears only later, in the first to fourth centuries CE.〔Salomon (1998), p. 81.〕 Indian epigraphy becomes more widespread over the 1st millennium, engraved on the faces of cliffs, on pillars, on tablets of stone, drawn in caves and on rocks, some gouged into the bedrock. Later they were also inscribed on palm leaves, coins, Indian copper plate inscriptions, and on temple walls. Many of the inscriptions are couched in extravagant language, but when the information gained from inscriptions can be corroborated with information from other sources such as still existing monuments or ruins, inscriptions provide insight into India's dynastic history that otherwise lacks contemporary historical records. Of the 1,00,000 (100,000) odd inscriptions found by the Archaeological Survey of India, about 60,000 were in Tamil Nadu; of these 60,000 inscriptions, only about 5 per cent were in other languages such as Telugu, Kannada, Sanskrit and Marathi; the rest were in Tamil. ==First appearance of writing in South Asia== The first introduction of writing to South Asia apart from the Bronze Age Indus script, which is undeciphered and may not be an actual script, is mostly identified as the Edicts of Ashoka from c. 250 BCE.〔Colin P. Masica, ''The Indo-Aryan Languages (Cambridge Language Surveys)'', Cambridge University Press, 1993.〕 Until the 1990s, it was generally accepted that the Brahmi script used by Ashoka spread to South India during the second half of the 3rd century BCE, assuming a local form now known as Tamil-Brahmi. Beginning in the late 1990s, archaeological excavations have produced a small number of candidates for Brahmi epigraphy predating Ashoka. Preliminary press reports of such pre-Ashokan inscriptions have appeared over the years, such as one in Palani dated to c. 450 BCE, but so far only the claimed pre-Ashokan inscriptions at Anuradhapura have been published academically. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Early Indian epigraphy」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|