Page:The Origin of the Bengali Script.djvu/26

8 himself. Consequently the date of the Piprāwā inscription must lie either in the 5th or the 4th centuries B.C. Palæographical evidence fully supports this conclusion: the archaic forms of the Brāhmī alphabet found on the Persian sigloi, which went out of the general use in Aśoka's time, are found to have been used in the inscription. An analysis, of the characters of this inscription, would be out of place here, as it does not properly belong to the Eastern variety of the Maurya alphabet. It serves to indicate the upper limit of the use of the alphabet of this period. The lower limit has been fixed by Bühler at 200 B.C. The seals, found by Cunningham at Pātnā, which according to Bühler belong to the period when Brāhmī was written boushophedonboustrophedon [sic] (), were really seal-matrices, like the Rohṭāsgaḍh Rock seal-matrix of the Mahāsāmantādhipati Śaśāṅka.

In 1896, Bühler admitted the existence of two distinct varieties of this alphabet, viz:—

(i) the Northern: to be found in the rock-edicts at Kālsi, the pillar-edicts at Allahabad, Rādhiā, Māthiā, Niglivā, Paḍeriā and Rāmpurwā, the minor rock-edicts at Bairāṭ, Sahasrām, the inscriptions of the Barābār caves and Sāñci and Sārnāth pillars;

(ii) the Southern: to be found in the-rock edicts at Girnār, Dhauli and Jaugaḍa and the minor rock-edicts at Siddapura.

Bühler already noticed the existence of varieties, at this period, in the Northern Maurya alphabet. "Even