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112-580: Hunas or Huna (Middle Brahmi script: [REDACTED] [REDACTED] Hūṇā ) was the name given by the ancient Indians to a group of Central Asian tribes who, via the Khyber Pass , entered the Indian subcontinent at the end of the 5th or early 6th century. The Hunas occupied areas as far south as Eran and Kausambi , greatly weakening the Gupta Empire . The Hunas were ultimately defeated by

224-521: A Hunnic state, although its precise origins remain unclear. In Bana 's Harshacharita (7th century CE), the Gurjaras are associated with the Hunas. Some of the Hunas may also have contributed to the formation of the warlike Rajputs . The religious beliefs of the Hunas is unknown, and believed to be a combination of ancestor worship, totemism and animism . Songyun and Huisheng , who visited

336-625: A pictographic - acrophonic origin for the Brahmi script, on the model of the Egyptian hieroglyphic script. These ideas however have lost credence, as they are "purely imaginative and speculative". Similar ideas have tried to connect the Brahmi script with the Indus script , but they remain unproven, and particularly suffer from the fact that the Indus script is as yet undeciphered. The mainstream view

448-457: A "very old culture of writing" along with its oral tradition of composing and transmitting knowledge, because the Vedic literature is too vast, consistent and complex to have been entirely created, memorized, accurately preserved and spread without a written system. Opinions on this point, the possibility that there may not have been any writing scripts including Brahmi during the Vedic age, given

560-643: A $ 720 million four-year investment deal with the Taliban government of Afghanistan for extraction on its side of the Amu Darya basin. The deal will see a 15% royalty given to the Afghan government over the course of its 25-year term. The Chinese see this basin as the third-largest potential gas field in the world. The clashing noise of battle reached the sky The blood of the Bengalees flowed like

672-764: A Phoenician prototype". Discoveries made since Bühler's proposal, such as of six Mauryan inscriptions in Aramaic, suggest Bühler's proposal about Phoenician as weak. It is more likely that Aramaic, which was virtually certainly the prototype for Kharoṣṭhī, also may have been the basis for Brahmi. However, it is unclear why the ancient Indians would have developed two very different scripts. According to Bühler, Brahmi added symbols for certain sounds not found in Semitic languages, and either deleted or repurposed symbols for Aramaic sounds not found in Prakrit. For example, Aramaic lacks

784-627: A coalition of Indian princes that included an Indian king Yasodharman and the Gupta emperor, Narasimhagupta . They defeated a Huna army and their ruler Mihirakula in 528 CE and drove them out of India. The Guptas are thought to have played only a minor role in this campaign. The Hunas are thought to have included the Xionite and/or Hephthalite , the Kidarites , the Alchon Huns (also known as

896-517: A connection to the Brahmi script. But in the second half of the 1st millennium CE, some inscriptions in India and Southeast Asia written in scripts derived from the Brahmi did include numerals that are decimal place value, and constitute the earliest existing material examples of the Hindu–Arabic numeral system , now in use throughout the world. The underlying system of numeration, however, was older, as

1008-400: A connection without knowing the phonetic values of the Indus script, though he found apparent similarities in patterns of compounding and diacritical modification to be "intriguing". However, he felt that it was premature to explain and evaluate them due to the large chronological gap between the scripts and the thus far indecipherable nature of the Indus script. The main obstacle to this idea

1120-492: A corresponding emphatic stop, p , Brahmi seems to have doubled up for the corresponding aspirate: Brahmi p and ph are graphically very similar, as if taken from the same source in Aramaic p . Bühler saw a systematic derivational principle for the other aspirates ch , jh , ph , bh , and dh , which involved adding a curve or upward hook to the right side of the character (which has been speculated to derive from h , [REDACTED] ), while d and ṭ (not to be confused with

1232-475: A late date for Kharoṣṭhī. The stronger argument for this position is that we have no specimen of the script before the time of Ashoka, nor any direct evidence of intermediate stages in its development; but of course this does not mean that such earlier forms did not exist, only that, if they did exist, they have not survived, presumably because they were not employed for monumental purposes before Ashoka". Unlike Bühler, Falk does not provide details of which and how

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1344-468: A league The shorn and parcelled Oxus strains along Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles — Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had In his high mountain-cradle in Pamere , A foiled circuitous wanderer: — till at last The longed-for dash of waves is heard, and wide His luminous home of waters opens, bright And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed stars Emerge, and shine upon

1456-548: A misunderstanding that the Mauryans were illiterate "based upon the fact that Megasthenes rightly observed that the laws were unwritten and that oral tradition played such an important part in India." Some proponents of the indigenous origin theories question the reliability and interpretation of comments made by Megasthenes (as quoted by Strabo in the Geographica XV.i.53). For one, the observation may only apply in

1568-437: A quarter century before Ashoka , noted "... and this among a people who have no written laws, who are ignorant even of writing, and regulate everything by memory." This has been variously and contentiously interpreted by many authors. Ludo Rocher almost entirely dismisses Megasthenes as unreliable, questioning the wording used by Megasthenes' informant and Megasthenes' interpretation of them. Timmer considers it to reflect

1680-408: A significant source for Brahmi. On this point particularly, Salomon disagrees with Falk, and after presenting evidence of very different methodology between Greek and Brahmi notation of vowel quantity, he states "it is doubtful whether Brahmi derived even the basic concept from a Greek prototype". Further, adds Salomon, in a "limited sense Brahmi can be said to be derived from Kharosthi, but in terms of

1792-482: Is a later alteration that appeared as it diffused away from the Persian sphere of influence. Persian dipi itself is thought to be an Elamite loanword. Falk's 1993 book Schrift im Alten Indien is a study on writing in ancient India, and has a section on the origins of Brahmi. It features an extensive review of the literature up to that time. Falk sees the basic writing system of Brahmi as being derived from

1904-733: Is a major river in Central Asia , which flows through Tajikistan , Turkmenistan , Uzbekistan and Afghanistan . Rising in the Pamir Mountains , north of the Hindu Kush , the Amu Darya is formed by the confluence of the Vakhsh and Panj rivers, in the Tigrovaya Balka Nature Reserve on the border between Afghanistan and Tajikistan , and flows from there north-westwards into the southern remnants of

2016-542: Is also not totally clear in the original Greek as the term " συντάξῃ " (source of the English word " syntax ") can be read as a generic "composition" or "arrangement", rather than a written composition in particular. Nearchus , a contemporary of Megasthenes , noted, a few decades prior, the use of cotton fabric for writing in Northern India. Indologists have variously speculated that this might have been Kharoṣṭhī or

2128-531: Is also true that their manner of living is unlike that of their kinsmen, nor do they live a savage life as they do; but they are ruled by one king, and since they possess a lawful constitution, they observe right and justice in their dealings both with one another and with their neighbours, in no degree less than the Romans and the Persians The Kidarites , who invaded Bactria in the second half of

2240-412: Is held by "nearly all" Western scholars, and Salomon agrees with Goyal that there has been "nationalist bias" and "imperialist bias" on the two respective sides of the debate. In spite of this, the view of indigenous development had been prevalent among British scholars writing prior to Bühler: a passage by Alexander Cunningham , one of the earliest indigenous origin proponents, suggests that, in his time,

2352-518: Is no evidence to support this conjecture. The chart below shows the close resemblance that Brahmi has with the first four letters of Semitic script, the first column representing the Phoenician alphabet . According to the Semitic hypothesis as laid out by Bühler in 1898, the oldest Brahmi inscriptions were derived from a Phoenician prototype. Salomon states Bühler's arguments are "weak historical, geographical, and chronological justifications for

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2464-647: Is possible that the Amu Darya's course across the Karakum Desert has gone through several major shifts in the past few thousand years. Much of the time – most recently from the 13th century to the late 16th century – the Amu Darya emptied into both the Aral and the Caspian Seas, reaching the latter via a large distributary called the Uzboy River . The Uzboy splits off from the main channel just south of

2576-491: Is supported by some Western and Indian scholars and writers. The theory that there are similarities to the Indus script was suggested by early European scholars such as the archaeologist John Marshall and the Assyriologist Stephen Langdon . G. R. Hunter in his book The Script of Harappa and Mohenjodaro and Its Connection with Other Scripts (1934) proposed a derivation of the Brahmi alphabets from

2688-536: Is that Brahmi has an origin in Semitic scripts (usually Aramaic). This is accepted by the vast majority of script scholars since the publications by Albrecht Weber (1856) and Georg Bühler 's On the origin of the Indian Brahma alphabet (1895). Bühler's ideas have been particularly influential, though even by the 1895 date of his opus on the subject, he could identify no fewer than five competing theories of

2800-479: Is the lack of evidence for writing during the millennium and a half between the collapse of the Indus Valley civilisation around 1500 BCE and the first widely accepted appearance of Brahmi in the 3rd or 4th centuries BCE. Iravathan Mahadevan makes the point that even if one takes the latest dates of 1500 BCE for the Indus script and earliest claimed dates of Brahmi around 500 BCE, a thousand years still separates

2912-659: The Samavāyāṅga Sūtra (3rd century BCE). These Jain script lists include Brahmi at number 1 and Kharoṣṭhi at number 4, but also Javanaliya (probably Greek ) and others not found in the Buddhist lists. While the contemporary Kharoṣṭhī script is widely accepted to be a derivation of the Aramaic alphabet , the genesis of the Brahmi script is less straightforward. Salomon reviewed existing theories in 1998, while Falk provided an overview in 1993. Early theories proposed

3024-573: The Afghanistan–Uzbekistan Friendship Bridge . It delineates the border of Afghanistan and Turkmenistan for another 100 kilometres (62 mi) before it flows into Turkmenistan at Atamurat . It flows across Turkmenistan south to north, passing Türkmenabat , and forms the border of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan from Halkabat. It is then split by the Tuyamuyun Hydro Complex into many waterways that used to form

3136-460: The Aral Sea . In its upper course, the river forms part of Afghanistan's northern border with Tajikistan, Uzbekistan , and Turkmenistan . In ancient history , the river was regarded as the boundary of Greater Iran with Turan , which roughly corresponded to present-day Central Asia. The Amu Darya has a flow of about 70 cubic kilometres per year on average. In classical antiquity , the river

3248-614: The Hindu Kush and isolated areas like Kafiristan . Some in Britain feared that the Empire of Russia, which at the time wielded great influence over the Oxus area, would overcome these obstacles and find a suitable route through which to invade British India – but this never came to pass. The area was taken over by Russia during the Russian conquest of Turkestan . The Soviet Union became

3360-531: The Jaxartes / Syr Darya twin river to Amu Darya). In Middle Persian sources of the Sasanian period the river is known as Wehrōd (lit. 'good river'). The name Amu is said to have come from the medieval city of Āmul (later Chahar Joy/Charjunow, and now known as Türkmenabat ) in modern Turkmenistan , with Daryā being the Persian word for 'lake' or 'sea'. Medieval Arabic and Islamic sources call

3472-624: The Levant through Persia to Afghanistan , with the Oxus as his stated goal, "to see certain famous monuments, chiefly the Gonbad-e Qabus , a tower built as a mausoleum for an ancient king." George MacDonald Fraser 's Flashman at the Charge (1973), places Flashman on the Amu Darya and the Aral Sea during the (fictitious) Russian advance on India during The Great Game period. But

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3584-609: The Lipisala samdarshana parivarta, lists 64 lipi (scripts), with the Brahmi script starting the list. The Lalitavistara Sūtra states that young Siddhartha, the future Gautama Buddha (~500 BCE), mastered philology, Brahmi and other scripts from the Brahmin Lipikāra and Deva Vidyāsiṃha at a school. A list of eighteen ancient scripts is found in the early Jaina texts , such as the Paṇṇavaṇā Sūtra (2nd century BCE) and

3696-536: The Mauryan period (3rd century BCE) down to the early Gupta period (4th century CE), and it is thought that as late as the 4th century CE, a literate person could still read and understand Mauryan inscriptions. Sometime thereafter, the ability to read the original Brahmi script was lost. The earliest (indisputably dated) and best-known Brahmi inscriptions are the rock-cut edicts of Ashoka in north-central India, dating to 250–232 BCE. The decipherment of Brahmi became

3808-567: The Old Persian dipi , in turn derived from Sumerian dup . To describe his own Edicts, Ashoka used the word Lipī , now generally simply translated as "writing" or "inscription". It is thought the word "lipi", which is also orthographed "dipi" in the two Kharosthi -version of the rock edicts, comes from an Old Persian prototype dipî also meaning "inscription", which is used for example by Darius I in his Behistun inscription , suggesting borrowing and diffusion. Scharfe adds that

3920-577: The Sanskrit language, it is a feminine word meaning literally "of Brahma" or "the female energy of the Brahman ". In popular Hindu texts such as the Mahabharata , it appears in the sense of a goddess, particularly for Saraswati as the goddess of speech and elsewhere as "personified Shakti (energy) of Brahma , the god of Hindu scriptures Veda and creation". Later Chinese Buddhist account of

4032-473: The Siberian tiger . A feasibility study was initiated to investigate if the area is suitable and if such an initiative would receive support from relevant decision makers. A viable tiger population of about 100 animals would require at least 5,000 km (1,900 sq mi) of large tracts of contiguous habitat with rich prey populations. Such habitat is not available at this stage and cannot be provided in

4144-424: The grammar of the Vedic language probably had a strong influence on this development. Some authors – both Western and Indian – suggest that Brahmi was borrowed or inspired by a Semitic script, invented in a short few years during the reign of Ashoka, and then used widely for Ashokan inscriptions. In contrast, some authors reject the idea of foreign influence. Bruce Trigger states that Brahmi likely emerged from

4256-664: The phonetic retroflex feature that appears among Prakrit dental stops, such as ḍ , and in Brahmi the symbols of the retroflex and non-retroflex consonants are graphically very similar, as if both had been derived from a single prototype. (See Tibetan alphabet for a similar later development.) Aramaic did not have Brahmi's aspirated consonants ( kh , th , etc.), whereas Brahmi did not have Aramaic's emphatic consonants ( q, ṭ, ṣ ), and it appears that these unneeded emphatic letters filled in for some of Brahmi's aspirates: Aramaic q for Brahmi kh, Aramaic ṭ (Θ) for Brahmi th ( ʘ ), etc. And just where Aramaic did not have

4368-405: The river delta joining the Aral Sea, passing Urgench , Daşoguz , and other cities, but it does not reach what is left of the sea any more and is lost in the desert. Use of water from the Amu Darya for irrigation has been a major contributing factor to the shrinking of the Aral Sea since the late 1950s. Historical records state that in different periods, the river flowed into the Aral Sea (from

4480-655: The 18th century) lists the Hunas alongside other peoples found in Central Asia since antiquity, including the Yavanas (Greeks), Kambojas , Tukharas , Khasas and Daradas . The Gurjara-Pratiharas suddenly emerged as a political power in north India around sixth century CE, shortly after the Hunas invasion of that region. The Gujara-Pratihara were "likely" formed from a fusion of the Alchon Huns ("White Huns") and native Indian elements, and can probably be considered as

4592-430: The 22 North Semitic characters, though clearly, as Bühler himself recognized, some are more confident than others. He tended to place much weight on phonetic congruence as a guideline, for example connecting c [REDACTED] to tsade 𐤑 rather than kaph 𐤊, as preferred by many of his predecessors. One of the key problems with a Phoenician derivation is the lack of evidence for historical contact with Phoenicians in

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4704-518: The 4th century, are generally regarded as the first wave of Hunas to enter Indian Subcontinent. The Gupta empire under Skandagupta in the 5th century had successfully repulsed one Hun attack in the northwest in 460 CE. However, over the period of the next several years, the Hunas under successive kings were able to make inroads into the subcontinent. They were initially based in the Oxus basin in Central Asia and established their control over Gandhara in

4816-556: The 6th century CE also supports its creation to the god Brahma , though Monier Monier-Williams , Sylvain Lévi and others thought it was more likely to have been given the name because it was moulded by the Brahmins . Oxus The Amu Darya ( / ˌ ɑː m uː ˈ d ɑːr j ə / AH-moo DAR-yə ), ( Persian : آمو دریا ) also shortened to Amu and historically known as the Oxus ( / ˈ ɒ k s ə s / OK -səss ),

4928-799: The Alxon, Alakhana, Walxon etc.) and the Nezak Huns . Such names, along with that of the Harahunas (also known as the Halahunas or Harahuras) mentioned in Hindu texts, have sometimes been used for the Hunas in general; while these groups (and the Iranian Huns ) appear to have been a component of the Hunas, such names were not necessarily synonymous. Some authors suggest that the Hunas were Hephthalite Huns from Central Asia. The relationship, if any, of

5040-486: The Amu Darya comes almost entirely from glaciers in the Pamir Mountains and Tian Shan , which, standing above the surrounding arid plain, collect atmospheric moisture which otherwise would probably escape elsewhere. Without its mountain water sources, the Amu Darya would not exist—because it rarely rains in the lowlands through which most of the river flows. Of the total drainage area, only about 200,000 square kilometres (77,000 sq mi) actively contribute water to

5152-477: The Aral. Genghis Khan 's troops destroyed the dam in 1221, and the Amu Darya shifted to distributing its flow more or less equally between the main stem and the Uzboy. But in the 18th century, the river again turned north, flowing into the Aral Sea, a path it has taken since. Less and less water flowed down the Uzboy. When Russian explorer Bekovich-Cherkasski surveyed the region in 1720, the Amu Darya did not flow into

5264-859: The Aramaic alphabet. Salomon regards the evidence from Greek sources to be inconclusive. Strabo himself notes this inconsistency regarding reports on the use of writing in India (XV.i.67). Kenneth Norman (2005) suggests that Brahmi was devised over a longer period of time predating Ashoka's rule: Support for this idea of pre-Ashokan development has been given very recently by the discovery of sherds at Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka , inscribed with small numbers of characters which seem to be Brāhmī. These sherds have been dated, by both Carbon 14 and Thermo-luminescence dating , to pre-Ashokan times, perhaps as much as two centuries before Ashoka. However, these finds are controversial, see Tamil Brahmi § Conflicting theories about origin since 1990s . He also notes that

5376-454: The Aramaic script (with extensive local development), but there is no evidence of a direct common source. According to Trigger, Brahmi was in use before the Ashoka pillars, at least by the 4th or 5th century BCE in Sri Lanka and India, while Kharoṣṭhī was used only in northwest South Asia (eastern parts of modern Afghanistan and neighboring regions of Pakistan) for a while before it died out in

5488-610: The Aramaic script being the prototype for Brahmi has been the more preferred hypothesis because of its geographic proximity to the Indian subcontinent, and its influence likely arising because Aramaic was the bureaucratic language of the Achaemenid empire. However, this hypothesis does not explain the mystery of why two very different scripts, Kharoṣṭhī and Brahmi, developed from the same Aramaic. A possible explanation might be that Ashoka created an imperial script for his edicts, but there

5600-583: The Caspian Sea anymore. By the 1800s, the ethnographic makeup of the region was described by Peter Kropotkin as the communities of "the vassal Khanates of Maimene, Khulm, Kunduz, and even the Badakshan and Wahkran." An Englishman, William Moorcroft , visited the Oxus around 1824 during the Great Game period. Another Englishman, a naval officer called John Wood , came with an expedition to find

5712-708: The Hunas to both the Xiongnu of north east Asia and the Huns who later invaded and settled in Europe. Similarly, Gerald Larson suggests that the Hunas were a Turkic - Mongolian grouping from Central Asia. The works of Ptolemy (2nd century) are among the first European texts to mention the Huns, followed by the texts by Marcellinus and Priscus. They too suggest that the Huns were an inner Asian people. The 6th-century Roman historian Procopius of Caesarea (Book I. ch. 3), related

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5824-530: The Hunas to the Huns , a Central Asian people who invaded Europe during the same period, is also unclear. In its farthest geographical extent in India, the territories controlled by the Hunas covered the region up to Malwa in central India . Their repeated invasions and war losses were the main reason for the decline of the Gupta Empire. Chinese sources link the Central Asian tribes comprising

5936-597: The Huns of Europe with the Hephthalites or "White Huns" who subjugated the Sassanids and invaded northwestern India , stating that they were of the same stock, "in fact as well as in name", although he contrasted the Huns with the Hephthalites, in that the Hephthalites were sedentary, white-skinned, and possessed "not ugly" features: The Ephthalitae Huns, who are called White Huns [...] The Ephthalitae are of

6048-468: The Indus script, the match being considerably higher than that of Aramaic in his estimation. British archaeologist Raymond Allchin stated that there is a powerful argument against the idea that the Brahmi script has Semitic borrowing because the whole structure and conception is quite different. He at one time suggested that the origin may have been purely indigenous with the Indus script as its predecessor. However, Allchin and Erdosy later in 1995 expressed

6160-552: The Indus valley and adjacent areas in the third millennium B.C. The number of different signs suggest a syllabic script, but all attempts at decipherment have been unsuccessful so far. Attempts by some Indian scholars to connect this undeciphered script with the Indian scripts in vogue from the third century B.C. onward are total failures." Megasthenes , a Greek ambassador to the Mauryan court in Northeastern India only

6272-427: The Kharoṣṭhī script, itself a derivative of Aramaic. At the time of his writing, the Ashoka edicts were the oldest confidently dateable examples of Brahmi, and he perceives in them "a clear development in language from a faulty linguistic style to a well honed one" over time, which he takes to indicate that the script had been recently developed. Falk deviates from the mainstream of opinion in seeing Greek as also being

6384-412: The Prakrit/Sanskrit word for writing itself, lipi is similar to the Old Persian word dipi , suggesting a probable borrowing. A few of the Ashoka edicts from the region nearest the Persian empire use dipi as the Prakrit word for writing, which appears as lipi elsewhere, and this geographic distribution has long been taken, at least back to Bühler's time, as an indication that the standard lipi form

6496-416: The Semitic emphatic ṭ ) were derived by back formation from dh and ṭh . The attached table lists the correspondences between Brahmi and North Semitic scripts. Bühler states that both Phoenician and Brahmi had three voiceless sibilants , but because the alphabetical ordering was lost, the correspondences among them are not clear. Bühler was able to suggest Brahmi derivatives corresponding to all of

6608-422: The Semitic hypothesis are similar to Gnanadesikan's trans-cultural diffusion view of the development of Brahmi and Kharoṣṭhī, in which the idea of alphabetic sound representation was learned from the Aramaic-speaking Persians, but much of the writing system was a novel development tailored to the phonology of Prakrit. Further evidence cited in favor of Persian influence has been the Hultzsch proposal in 1925 that

6720-401: The Vedic hymns may well have been achieved orally, but that the development of Panini's grammar presupposes writing (consistent with a development of Indian writing in c. the 4th century BCE). Several divergent accounts of the origin of the name "Brahmi" (ब्राह्मी) appear in history. The term Brahmi (बाम्भी in original) appears in Indian texts in different contexts. According to the rules of

6832-400: The actual forms of the characters, the differences between the two Indian scripts are much greater than the similarities". Falk also dated the origin of Kharoṣṭhī to no earlier than 325 BCE, based on a proposed connection to the Greek conquest. Salomon questions Falk's arguments as to the date of Kharoṣṭhī and writes that it is "speculative at best and hardly constitutes firm grounds for

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6944-425: The appearance of the Brahmi and scripts up into the third century CE. These graffiti usually appear singly, though on occasion may be found in groups of two or three, and are thought to have been family, clan, or religious symbols. In 1935, C. L. Fábri proposed that symbols found on Mauryan punch-marked coins were remnants of the Indus script that had survived the collapse of the Indus civilization. Another form of

7056-418: The area between the former empires of Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great , although they occurred at very different times. When the Mongols came to the area, they used the water of the Amu Darya to flood Konye-Urgench . One southern route of the Silk Road ran along part of the Amu Darya northwestward from Termez before going westwards to the Caspian Sea . According to the Quaternary International, it

7168-409: The best evidence is that no script was used or ever known in India, aside from the Persian-dominated Northwest where Aramaic was used, before around 300 BCE because Indian tradition "at every occasion stresses the orality of the cultural and literary heritage", yet Scharfe in the same book admits that "a script has been discovered in the excavations of the Indus Valley Civilization that flourished in

7280-407: The canal with the Taliban. The Taliban has made the canal a priority, with images supplied by Planet Labs demonstrate that from April 2022 to February 2023, more than 100 km of canal was excavated. According to the Taliban, the initiative is expected to convert 550,000 hectares of desert into farmland. In January 2023, the Xinjiang Central Asia Petroleum and Gas Company (aka CAPEIC) signed

7392-416: The characters to stick figures . It was known by a variety of other names, including "lath", "Laṭ", "Southern Aśokan", "Indian Pali" or "Mauryan" ( Salomon 1998 , p. 17), until the 1880s when Albert Étienne Jean Baptiste Terrien de Lacouperie , based on an observation by Gabriel Devéria , associated it with the Brahmi script, the first in a list of scripts mentioned in the Lalitavistara Sūtra . Thence

7504-405: The chief of the Hephthalite nomads at his summer residence in Badakshan and later in Gandhara , observed that they had no belief in the Buddhist law and served a large number of divinities." Brahmi Brahmi is an abugida and uses a system of diacritical marks to associate vowels with consonant symbols. The writing system only went through relatively minor evolutionary changes from

7616-442: The context of the kingdom of "Sandrakottos" (Chandragupta). Elsewhere in Strabo (Strab. XV.i.39), Megasthenes is said to have noted that it was a regular custom in India for the "philosopher" caste (presumably Brahmins) to submit "anything useful which they have committed to writing" to kings, but this detail does not appear in parallel extracts of Megasthenes found in Arrian and Diodorus Siculus . The implication of writing per se

7728-432: The earliest attested orally transmitted example dates to the middle of the 3rd century CE in a Sanskrit prose adaptation of a lost Greek work on astrology . The Brahmi script is mentioned in the ancient Indian texts of the three major Dharmic religions : Hinduism , Jainism , and Buddhism , as well as their Chinese translations . For example, the 10th chapter of the Lalitavistara Sūtra (c. 200–300 CE), titled

7840-437: The end of the 19th century, there have been four different claimants as the true source of the Oxus: A glacier turns into the Wakhan River and joins the Pamir River about 50 kilometres (31 mi) downstream. Bill Colegrave's expedition to Wakhan in 2007 found that both claimants 2 and 3 had the same source, the Chelab stream, which bifurcates on the watershed of the Little Pamir, half flowing into Lake Chamaktin and half into

7952-415: The fall of the Soviet Union this system disintegrated and the Central Asian nations have failed to reinstate it. Inadequate infrastructure, poor water management, and outdated irrigation methods all exacerbate the issue. The Caspian tiger used to occur along the river's banks. After its extirpation, the Darya's delta was suggested as a potential site for the introduction of its closest surviving relative,

8064-716: The focus of European scholarly attention in the early 19th-century during East India Company rule in India , in particular in the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta . Brahmi was deciphered by James Prinsep , the secretary of the Society, in a series of scholarly articles in the Society's journal in the 1830s. His breakthroughs built on the epigraphic work of Christian Lassen , Edwin Norris , H. H. Wilson and Alexander Cunningham , among others. The origin of

8176-496: The indigenous origin theory is that Brahmi was invented ex nihilo , entirely independently from either Semitic models or the Indus script, though Salomon found these theories to be wholly speculative in nature. Pāṇini (6th to 4th century BCE) mentions lipi , the Indian word for writing scripts in his definitive work on Sanskrit grammar, the Ashtadhyayi . According to Scharfe, the words lipi and libi are borrowed from

8288-402: The indigenous origin was a preference of British scholars in opposition to the "unknown Western" origin preferred by continental scholars. Cunningham in the seminal Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum of 1877 speculated that Brahmi characters were derived from, among other things, a pictographic principle based on the human body, but Bühler noted that, by 1891, Cunningham considered the origins of

8400-455: The interaction between the Indic and the Semitic worlds before the rise of the Semitic scripts might imply a reverse process. However, the chronology thus presented and the notion of an unbroken tradition of literacy is opposed by a majority of academics who support an indigenous origin. Evidence for a continuity between Indus and Brahmi has also been seen in graphic similarities between Brahmi and

8512-417: The late Indus script, where the ten most common ligatures correspond with the form of one of the ten most common glyphs in Brahmi. There is also corresponding evidence of continuity in the use of numerals. Further support for this continuity comes from statistical analysis of the relationship carried out by Das. Salomon considered simple graphic similarities between characters to be insufficient evidence for

8624-445: The majestic River floated on, Out of the mist and hum of that low land, Into the frosty starlight, and there moved, Rejoicing, through the hushed Chorasmian waste, Under the solitary moon: — he flowed Right for the polar star, past Orgunjè, Brimming, and bright, and large: then sands begin To hem his watery march, and dam his streams, And split his currents; that for many

8736-471: The name was adopted in the influential work of Georg Bühler , albeit in the variant form "Brahma". The Gupta script of the 5th century is sometimes called "Late Brahmi". From the 6th century onward, the Brahmi script diversified into numerous local variants, grouped as the Brahmic family of scripts . Dozens of modern scripts used across South and South East Asia have descended from Brahmi, making it one of

8848-464: The northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent by about 465 CE. From there, they fanned out into various parts of northern, western, and central India . The Hūṇas are mentioned in several ancient texts such as the Rāmāyaṇa , Mahābhārata , Purāṇas , and Kalidasa’s Raghuvaṃśa . In 528 CE, another campaign led by a coalition of Indian kings finally defeated king Mihirakula and his Huna army. The victory

8960-417: The opinion that there was as yet insufficient evidence to resolve the question. Today the indigenous origin hypothesis is more commonly promoted by non-specialists, such as the computer scientist Subhash Kak , the spiritual teachers David Frawley and Georg Feuerstein , and the social anthropologist Jack Goody . Subhash Kak disagrees with the proposed Semitic origins of the script, instead stating that

9072-427: The origin, one positing an indigenous origin and the others deriving it from various Semitic models. The most disputed point about the origin of the Brahmi script has long been whether it was a purely indigenous development or was borrowed or derived from scripts that originated outside India. Goyal (1979) noted that most proponents of the indigenous view are fringe Indian scholars, whereas the theory of Semitic origin

9184-758: The parent stream of the Little Pamir/Sarhad River. Therefore, the Chelab stream may be properly considered the true source or parent stream of the Oxus. The Panj River forms the border of Afghanistan and Tajikistan . It flows west to Ishkashim where it turns north and then north-west through the Pamirs passing the Tajikistan–Afghanistan Friendship Bridge . It subsequently forms the border of Afghanistan and Uzbekistan for about 200 kilometres (120 mi), passing Termez and

9296-472: The particular Semitic script, and the chronology of the derivation have been the subject of much debate. Bühler followed Max Weber in connecting it particularly to Phoenician, and proposed an early 8th century BCE date for the borrowing. A link to the South Semitic scripts , a less prominent branch of the Semitic script family, has occasionally been proposed, but has not gained much acceptance. Finally,

9408-613: The phonemic analysis of the Sanskrit language achieved by the Vedic scholars is much closer to the Brahmi script than the Greek alphabet". As of 2018, Harry Falk refined his view by affirming that Brahmi was developed from scratch in a rational way at the time of Ashoka , by consciously combining the advantages of the pre-existing Greek script and northern Kharosthi script. Greek-style letter types were selected for their "broad, upright and symmetrical form", and writing from left to right

9520-549: The presumptive prototypes may have been mapped to the individual characters of Brahmi. Further, states Salomon, Falk accepts there are anomalies in phonetic value and diacritics in Brahmi script that are not found in the presumed Kharoṣṭhī script source. Falk attempts to explain these anomalies by reviving the Greek influence hypothesis, a hypothesis that had previously fallen out of favor. Hartmut Scharfe, in his 2002 review of Kharoṣṭī and Brāhmī scripts, concurs with Salomon's questioning of Falk's proposal, and states, "the pattern of

9632-400: The quantity and quality of the Vedic literature, are divided. While Falk (1993) disagrees with Goody, while Walter Ong and John Hartley (2012) concur, not so much based on the difficulty of orally preserving the Vedic hymns, but on the basis that it is highly unlikely that Panini's grammar was composed. Johannes Bronkhorst (2002) takes the intermediate position that the oral transmission of

9744-527: The relevant period. Bühler explained this by proposing that the initial borrowing of Brahmi characters dates back considerably earlier than the earliest known evidence, as far back as 800 BCE, contemporary with the Phoenician glyph forms that he mainly compared. Bühler cited a near-modern practice of writing Brahmic scripts informally without vowel diacritics as a possible continuation of this earlier abjad-like stage in development. The weakest forms of

9856-655: The river Jaihun . ~ Mirza Nathan describing a battle between the Mughals and Musa Khan of Bengal (translated by M. I. Borah) The Oxus river, and Arnold's poem, fire the imaginations of the children who adventure with ponies over the moors of the West Country in the 1930s children's book The Far-Distant Oxus . There were two sequels, Escape to Persia and Oxus in Summer . Robert Byron 's 1937 travelogue, The Road to Oxiana , describes its author's journey from

9968-520: The river Jeyhoun ( Arabic : جَـيْـحُـوْن , romanized :  Jayḥūn ), which is derived from Gihon , the biblical name for one of the four rivers of the Garden of Eden . The Amu Darya passes through one of the world's highest deserts. Western travelers in the 19th century mentioned that one of the names by which the river was known in Afghanistan was Gozan , and that this name

10080-486: The river's delta. Sometimes the flow through the two branches was more or less equal, but often most of the Amu Darya's flow split to the west and flowed into the Caspian. People began to settle along the lower Amu Darya and the Uzboy in the 5th century, establishing a thriving chain of agricultural lands, towns, and cities. In about AD 985, the massive Gurganj Dam at the bifurcation of the forks started to divert water to

10192-520: The river. This is because many of the river's major tributaries (especially the Zeravshan River ) have been diverted, and much of the river's drainage is arid. Throughout most of the steppe, the annual rainfall is about 300 millimetres (12 in). The ancient Greeks called the Amu Darya the Oxus . In ancient times, the river was regarded as the boundary between Greater Iran and Ṫūrān ( Persian : تُوران ). The river's drainage lies in

10304-535: The rivers was already being used for agriculture, but not on this massive scale. The Qaraqum Canal , Karshi Canal, and Bukhara Canal were among the largest of the irrigation diversions built. However, the Main Turkmen Canal , which would have diverted water along the dry Uzboy River bed into central Turkmenistan, was never built. In the course of the Soviet–Afghan War in the 1970s, Soviet forces used

10416-660: The ruling power in the early 1920s and expelled Mohammed Alim Khan . It later put down the Basmachi movement and killed Ibrahim Bek . A large refugee population of Central Asians, including Turkmen, Tajiks, and Uzbeks, fled to northern Afghanistan. In the 1960s and 1970s the Soviets started using the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya to irrigate extensive cotton fields in the Central Asian plain. Before this time, water from

10528-412: The script is still much debated, with most scholars stating that Brahmi was derived from or at least influenced by one or more contemporary Semitic scripts . Some scholars favour the idea of an indigenous origin or connection to the much older and as yet undeciphered Indus script but the evidence is insufficient at best. Brahmi was at one time referred to in English as the "pin-man" script, likening

10640-616: The script uncertain. Most scholars believe that Brahmi was likely derived from or influenced by a Semitic script model, with Aramaic being a leading candidate. However, the issue is not settled due to the lack of direct evidence and unexplained differences between Aramaic, Kharoṣṭhī, and Brahmi. Though Brahmi and the Kharoṣṭhī script share some general features, the differences between the Kharosthi and Brahmi scripts are "much greater than their similarities", and "the overall differences between

10752-466: The short term. The proposed region is therefore unsuitable for the reintroduction, at least at this stage. Since March 2022, the building of the 285 km Qosh Tepa Canal has been underway in northern Afghanistan to divert water from the Amu Darya. Uzbekistan has expressed concern that the canal will have an adverse effect on its agriculture. The canal is also expected to make the Aral Sea disaster worse, and in 2023 Uzbek officials held talks on

10864-454: The source alphabet recite the sounds by combining the consonant with an unmarked vowel, e.g. /kə/, /kʰə/, /gə/ , and in the process of borrowing into another language, these syllables are taken to be the sound values of the symbols. They also accepted the idea that Brahmi was based on a North Semitic model. Many scholars link the origin of Brahmi to Semitic script models, particularly Aramaic. The explanation of how this might have happened,

10976-493: The source of the river in 1839. He found modern-day Lake Zorkul , called it Lake Victoria, and proclaimed he had found the source. Then, the French explorer and geographer Thibaut Viné collected a lot of information about this area during five expeditions between 1856 and 1862. The question of finding a route between the Oxus valley and India has been of concern historically. A direct route crosses extremely high mountain passes in

11088-655: The south), into the Caspian Sea (from the east), or both, similar to the Syr Darya (Jaxartes, in Ancient Greek ). Partly based on such records, first Tsarist and later Soviet engineers proposed to divert the Amu Darya to the Caspian Sea by constructing the Transcaspian Canal . The 534,769 square kilometres (206,475 sq mi) of the Amu Darya drainage basin include most of Tajikistan,

11200-484: The southwest corner of Kyrgyzstan , the northeast corner of Afghanistan, a narrow portion of eastern Turkmenistan and the western half of Uzbekistan. Part of the Amu Darya basin divide in Tajikistan forms that country's border with China (in the east) and Pakistan (to the south). About 61% of the drainage lies within Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, while 39% is in Afghanistan. The abundant water flowing in

11312-460: The stock of the Huns in fact as well as in name, however they do not mingle with any of the Huns known to us, for they occupy a land neither adjoining nor even very near to them; but their territory lies immediately to the north of Persia [...] They are not nomads like the other Hunnic peoples, but for a long period have been established in a goodly land... They are the only ones among the Huns who have white bodies and countenances which are not ugly. It

11424-404: The third century. According to Salomon, evidence of the use of Kharoṣṭhī is found primarily in Buddhist records and those of Indo-Greek, Indo-Scythian, Indo-Parthian, and Kushana dynasty era. Justeson and Stephens proposed that this inherent vowel system in Brahmi and Kharoṣṭhī developed by transmission of a Semitic abjad through the recitation of its letter values. The idea is that learners of

11536-416: The two render a direct linear development connection unlikely", states Richard Salomon. Virtually all authors accept that regardless of the origins, the differences between the Indian script and those proposed to have influenced it are significant. The degree of Indian development of the Brahmi script in both the graphic form and the structure has been extensive. It is also widely accepted that theories about

11648-466: The two. Furthermore, there is no accepted decipherment of the Indus script, which makes theories based on claimed decipherments tenuous. A promising possible link between the Indus script and later writing traditions may be in the megalithic graffiti symbols of the South Indian megalithic culture, which may have some overlap with the Indus symbol inventory and persisted in use up at least through

11760-646: The valley to invade Afghanistan through Termez . The Soviet Union fell in the 1990s and Central Asia split up into the many smaller countries that lie within or partially within the Amu Darya basin. During the Soviet era, a resource-sharing system was instated in which Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan shared water originating from the Amu and Syr Daryas with Kazakhstan , Turkmenistan , and Uzbekistan in summer. In return, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan received Kazakh, Turkmen, and Uzbek coal, gas, and electricity in winter. After

11872-536: The variations seen in the Asokan edicts would be unlikely to have emerged so quickly if Brahmi had a single origin in the chancelleries of the Mauryan Empire. He suggests a date of not later than the end of the 4th century for the development of Brahmi script in the form represented in the inscriptions, with earlier possible antecedents. Jack Goody (1987) had similarly suggested that ancient India likely had

11984-403: The water comes from the high mountains in the south where annual precipitation can be over 1,000 mm (39 in). Even before large-scale irrigation began, high summer evaporation meant that not all of this discharge reached the Aral Sea – though there is some evidence the large Pamir glaciers provided enough meltwater for the Aral to overflow during the 13th and 14th centuries. Since

12096-484: The world's most influential writing traditions. One survey found 198 scripts that ultimately derive from it. Among the inscriptions of Ashoka ( c.  3rd century BCE ) written in the Brahmi script a few numerals were found, which have come to be called the Brahmi numerals . The numerals are additive and multiplicative and, therefore, not place value ; it is not known if their underlying system of numeration has

12208-406: Was also adopted for its convenience. On the other hand, the Kharosthi treatment of vowels was retained, with its inherent vowel "a", derived from Aramaic , and stroke additions to represent other vowel signs. In addition, a new system of combining consonants vertically to represent complex sounds was also developed. The possibility of an indigenous origin such as a connection to the Indus script

12320-609: Was inscribed on a stone pillar and erected in honor of (and in praise for) one of the leaders of the coalition, king Yashodharman, in Mandasaur in Central India. Huna kings in this inscription are described as 'rude and cruel'. They were also responsible for the destruction of Buddhist monasteries and centers of learning in the Northwest regions of the country. The Mongolian-Tibetan historian Sumpa Yeshe Peljor (writing in

12432-528: Was known as the Ōxus in Latin and Ὦξος ( Ôxos ) in Greek — a clear derivative of Vakhsh , the name of the largest tributary of the river. In Sanskrit texts , the river is also referred to as Vakṣu ( वक्षु ). The Brahmanda Purana refers to the river as Chaksu which means 'an eye'. The Avestan texts too refer to the river as Yakhsha/Vakhsha (and Yakhsha Arta ('Upper Yakhsha'), referring to

12544-441: Was used by Greek, Mongol, Chinese, Persian, Jewish, and Afghan historians. However, this name is no longer used. The river's total length is 2,400 kilometres (1,500 mi) and its drainage basin totals 534,739 square kilometres (206,464 sq mi) in area, providing a mean discharge of around 97.4 cubic kilometres (23.4 cu mi) of water per year. The river is navigable for over 1,450 kilometres (900 mi). All of

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