Page 147 - Berkshire Encyclopedia Of World History Vol Two

496 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

als are meager; one inscription apparently dating from
centuries earlier suggests a connection with Linear B.)

South and Inner
Asia Scripts
Turning to the East, only three Asian scripts had been so
thoroughly lost as to need decipherment. The first two,
the Brahmi that is ancestral to a vast range of scripts in
South and Southeast Asia, contemporary with India’s
King Ashoka in the mid-third century BCE, and its slightly
the assumption that they had to represent the language earlier predecessor the Kharoshthi, succumbed to James
of a pre-Greek people; after much preliminary work, in Prinsep in 1837 and 1838 respectively. Brahmi opened
1952 Michael Ventris had the insight that the language of up Ashoka’s own decrees, which commended Buddhist
Linear B was not Etruscan-like, or anything even less well principles to readers of a variety of Prakrits (early collo-
known, but an early form of Greek. Translation of the quial Indo-Aryan languages; it would not be usual to
available materials proved disappointing: They are noth- write Sanskrit for several centuries), and established the
ing but economic documents—probably nothing else starting point for the immense variety of Indian inscrip-
was ever written down in the script, since the extensive tional scripts (the later forms of which could still be read
and elaborately painted palace walls are devoid of by the pandits anyway). Kharoshthi was devised for the
inscriptions—and the main importance of the decipher- Gandhari language in northwestern India. But both
ment was to demonstrate the presence of Greeks in the scripts spread along the Silk Road, in both mundane
region centuries earlier than previously assumed. (In the texts and texts providing insight into the development of
early 1870s, George Smith and Moriz Schmidt had deci- Buddhism; Brahmi came to be used for some Iranian lan-
phered the Cypriote syllabary, in which Greek was writ- guages, as well as the defunct Indo-European language
ten on Cyprus about the same time the Greek alphabet family Tocharian.
was being devised: from the eighth century BCE. Materi- The other Asian decipherment, of the Turkish or