Kharosthi

The Kharosthi script, also called the Gandhari script, was an ancient writing system created in the Gandhara Region of the north-western Indian subcontinent between the 5th and 3rd century BCE. People in Gandhara and other parts of South Asia and Central Asia used this script for many years.

Kharosthi stayed in use until around the 5th century CE in its original home, but it was also used in faraway places like Bactria, the Kushan Empire, Sogdia, and along the Silk Road. Some signs show it might have continued in use until the 7th century in cities such as Khotan and Niya, located in the Tarim Basin.

History

The name Kharosthi might come from a Hebrew word for writing, or from an old Iranian phrase meaning "royal writing." Scholars debate whether this script developed slowly or was created by one person. It is clear that Kharosthi was based on the Aramaic alphabet, but with many changes. Some believe it came from Aramaic scripts used during the time of Darius the Great, after the Achaemenid conquest of the Indus Valley around 500 BCE. However, no early forms of the script have been found to support this idea.

While the Brahmi script continued to be used for centuries, Kharosthi stopped being used after the 2nd–3rd century AD. Because it looked very different from later scripts, knowledge of it disappeared until it was rediscovered by Western scholars in the 19th century. Researchers like James Prinsep, Carl Ludwig Grotefend, and Christian Lassen managed to read Kharosthi using coins from the Indo-Greek Kingdom that had text in both Greek and Kharosthi.

Recently, the study of Kharosthi became more exciting with the discovery of the Gandhāran Buddhist texts. These are old manuscripts written on birch bark in Kharosthi, found near the city of Hadda close to the Khyber Pass in Pakistan. They were donated to the British Library in 1994. These manuscripts, dating from the 1st century BCE to the 3rd century CE, are the oldest Buddhist texts ever found.

Alphabet

Kharosthi is mostly written right to left. The alphabet is also called the arapacana alphabet and has a special order:

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 ḍha

This alphabet was used in Gandharan Buddhism as a memory aid for verses about understanding things, similar to the Shiva Sutras of other scripts. Today, the first line arapacana is still used in a special chant for Manjushri, a kind and wise figure.

Consonants

A special mark above a letter can change how it sounds, like making a nasal sound. It works with certain letters.

Another mark changes consonants in different ways. It is used with several letters.

A dot below a letter is used with two letters, but we do not know exactly what sound it makes.

Vowels and syllables

Kharosthi has just one vowel letter by itself for words that start with a vowel. Other starting vowels use the a letter with extra marks.

Each syllable usually includes the short /a/ sound, and other vowels are shown with special marks.

Long vowels have a special mark. A special symbol shows a nasal sound. Another symbol shows an unvoiced /h/ sound at the end of a syllable. There is also a rare mark found in some far-away documents, but we do not know what sound it makes.

The order of vowels is /a e i o u/, like in some other writing systems, not the usual order for Indic scripts.

Additional marks

The Kharosthi script uses special marks to change the sounds of vowels and consonants.

Punctuation

Scholars have found nine different punctuation marks used in the Kharosthi script.

Numerals

Kharosthi used special symbols for numbers, similar to how we use Roman numerals today. These symbols were written from right to left, and they added up to make larger numbers, just like counting with blocks. For example, the number 1996 was shown by combining several symbols together.

Unicode

Main article: Kharoshthi (Unicode block)

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: