Sunday, May 14, 2017

Kharoshti

PALAEOGRAPHY: Kharoshti: Story of the ancient scripts (Iqbal Ahmad, Kashmir Images). (An article mostly based on the Wikipedia article on the same subject.) This gives a brief account of the story of Kharoshti, an ancient Indian script based on the Aramaic alphabet. It was used to write texts in Sanskrit and related dialects. A cache of Buddhist manuscripts written in the Kharoshti script (the Gandhāran Buddhist texts) was discovered in Pakistan and was given to the British Library in 1994. The manuscripts date to the first century CE, around the same time as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Cross-file under Aramaic Watch.