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Beyond Space and Time: The Remarkable History of the Brāhmī Script

by Melinda Fodor

Without two fundamental inventions—language and writing—knowledge could not have evolved. Among different writing and calculating systems, there was an ancient Indian script, Brāhmī, which gave rise to an ingenious numbering system that has powered technological developments through centuries and continues to do so in our computer age, including artificial intelligence. This is the captivating story of the surprising link between Brāhmī and the numbers we use every day.

Writing has played an essential role in the transmission of knowledge. Among the ancient scriptures, the journey of the brāhmī, used in ancient India, stands out. It is an alphasyllabic writing system that reads from left to right, with its earliest traces found on Aśoka’s pillars in the third century BCE. Although the origins of Brāhmī remain debated, this writing system gave rise to numerous other scripts, adapting over time to the diverse phonetic nuances of languages that were absent from its initial repertoire.

The feet of a great Jain statue near Hassan, known as the Bhagawan Bahubali Statue (Gommateshwara), bear inscriptions engraved in Kannada and Tamil, along with the oldest written evidence of Marathi, dating to 981 BC. Karkala, Karnataka, India (2017), © Melinda Fodor

In classical India, two languages coexisted: Vedic Sanskrit, reserved for high-caste individuals and religious rituals, and Prakrit, a more common language used for daily communication. Prakrit encompassed various regional dialects, akin to the Italian languages. Aśoka’s edicts were written in this lingua franca using Brāhmī script, tailored to the dialectal variations of each region. This script served as a vehicle for communicating Aśoka’s decrees, proclaimed by those who could read it.

The uniqueness of Brāhmī lies in its adaptability to the specificities of each language, unlike its contemporary, Kharoṣṭī. Thus, Brāhmī underwent multiple transformations and adaptations across time and space until our era. Initially adjusted for Sanskrit, it introduced diacritics specific to Sanskrit, absent in Prakrit. We know different types of Brāhmī for the Sanskrit language used in the first centuries of our era, such as cursive Brāhmī, then its adaptations to Middle-Indian languages (such as Brāhmī Tamil, Kaliṅga, Grantha, Śāradā, Gupta, Pallava, Nandī, Nāgarī), and finally to Modern Indian languages (Devanāgarī, Bengali, Gujarati, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, etc.). Additionally, foreign countries enriched their scripts based on descendants of Brāhmī (Khmer, Javanese, Thai, Sinhalese, Lao, Tibetan, and Mongolian).

The journey of Brāhmī numerals, also known as Indian numerals, is indeed even more exceptional. While various civilisations developed different numeral and calculation systems, it was the Brāhmī system that solidified its place in the world. Decimal numerals, including zero, which we study in school and use daily, have their origins in India.

The Indian positional decimal numbering system, albeit without zero, first appeared on the edicts of Aśoka, located in Lumbinī, Nepal. Initially, as they had no diacritical symbol to mark the zero, they left a blank character in its place. It was in a Jain work written in Sanskrit, the Lokavibhāga, dating back to the fifth century, that zero made its debut in the form of a dot or circle. The concept of ‘void’ (sk. śunya) in mathematics, associated with zero, was elaborated by Brahmagupta in the seventh century. According to him, zero is ‘void’ because its value depends on its position: before a digit, it signifies nothing, but after a digit, it modifies the value of the initial digit (for example, 01=1, but 01≠10). Zero revolutionized mathematics by allowing us to represent ten, hundred, thousand, a million, a trillion, a billion, with their values contingent on their initial position.

Interestingly, the dot or circle was not new to the Brāhmī script and its descendants. The dot placed above a consonant with an inherent vowel, called ansuvāra, marks a silent labial consonant ‘m’, pronounced with closed lips, like a resonance, echo or vibration, sometimes nasalised. It is this anusvāra that is found in the sacred symbol oṁ (originally auṁ). According to the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad (before our era), each carater represents a state of existence: a as the waking state (sk. jāgrat), u as the dream state (sk. svapna), m as the sleeping state (sk. suṣupti), and the ansuvāra dotis considered as the state beyond worldly existence, the immortal soul, absolute conscience, the unlimited universe, empty space, compared to Brahman, god creator of the world.

The concept of ‘void’ holds a central place in Indian philosophy, particularly within Mahāyāna Buddhism. The Hṛdaya Sūtra (‘Essential Aphorism’), part of the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra, a major teaching on the perfection of wisdom, expresses the quintessence of Buddhism. Translated into Chinese, Japanese and Tibetan, this text was likely composed before the fourth century and became immensely popular in Mahāyāna Buddhism. It declares that “everything is emptiness, and emptiness is everything” (sarvaṃ śūnyaṁ śūnyataiva sarvaṃ). The void therefore does not mean ‘non-existence’ or ‘nothing’, but rather the absence of independent existence and the innumerable possibilities of occurrence that it contains. Thus, this concept of zero as ‘void’ is probably older than its first use in the mathematical texts that have come down to us.

After the introduction of the dot or circle as a zero marker, this symbol also appeared in South Indian manuscripts, to indicate the doubling of a consonant, for example, ka=kka and kha•=khkha, like 1 (k), 10 (kka) and 2 (kha), 20 (khkha). Indeed, in Indian classical meters (qualitative), the geminate consonants are pronounced like their Italian counterparts and definitively fix the value of a syllable as a stressed one (sk. guru ‘heavy’), making it superior to an unstressed one (sk. laghu ‘short’). In Indian popular meters (quantitative), a stressed syllable is worth twice an unstressed one. Therefore, the dot following a simple consonant, making it geminate, multiplies its original value, such as zero after a number. Therefore, the dot indicating gemination is not just a practical time-saving device for the scribe, but also a smart way to adopt the zero symbol into the writing system. Indian numerals were adopted by the Arabs in the ninth century, significantly contributing to their mathematical development. When the Arabs encountered Europeans in southern Europe, the Indian system became integrated into Western usage by the thirteenth century thanks to the Italian mathematician Fibonacci. Hence the name “Arabic numerals”. This is why, even today, we can notice a great similarity between numbers in Indian (such as devanāgarī), Arabic and Latin characters, because they go back to a common source, the Brāhmī. Devanāgarī: ० १ २ ३ ४ ५ ६ ७ ८ ९ (from left to right); Arabic: ٠  ١ ٢ ٣ ٤ ٥ ٦ ٧ ٨ ٩(from right to left); Latin: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9.

Melinda Fodor, Part-time Lecturer-Researcher (GREI)

Melinda Fodor is a specialist in Indian literature and Buddhist philosophy in Sanskrit, Pali, Prakrit, and Tibetan. She focusses on Prakrit literature and poetics, having completed her Ph. D. dissertation on Prakrit drama in 2017 (EPHE-PSL). She catalogued the Pelliot collection of Sanskrit manuscripts at the National Library of France as part of the HisTochText project (2018-2021). A recipient of prestigious fellowships, she has also taught Prakrit at the University of Aix-en-Provence and the University of Rome Sapienza. Since 2021, Melinda Fodor has been teaching Prakrit (beginner and intermediate levels) at ILARA.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
ILARA (January 27, 2025). Beyond Space and Time: The Remarkable History of the Brāhmī Script. ILARA, the Institute for Linguistic Heritage and Diversity. Retrieved March 17, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13648


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