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A HANDBOOK OF
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13 | A HANDBOOK OF
13°, ASIAN SCRIPTS
EDITED BY R.F.HOSKING AND

G.M.MEREDITH-OWENS

LONDON

PUBLISHED BY THE TRUSTEES OF

THE BRITISH MUSEUM
1966
 © 1966 The Trustees of the British Museum

Theology Library
CLAREMONT
SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY
Claremont, CA

Printed in Great Britain

at the University Printing House, Cambridge
(Brooke Crutchley, University Printer)
 - CONTENTS
LIST OF PLATES page vii
PREFACE vili
INTRODUCTION I

It. THE SEMITIC ALPHABET

1 Palaeo-Hebrew and Samaritan
2 The Aramaic script and its earlier derivatives
Hebrew
Pahlavi WwW
WR
OMY

Syriac
Mandaic 564

3 Central Asian scripts developed from the Aramaic 12

Sogdian 12
Uighur 13
Old Turkish Runic 14
Mongol 14
4 Arabic 16
Persian and Turkish 19
Urdu, Sindhi, Pushtu and Malay 22

5 South-Semitic scripts wees

Ethiopic 22

III. SCRIPTS ADAPTED FROM THE GREEK ALPHABET 24

1 Coptic 24
2 Armenian and Georgian 24
IV. THE INDIAN SCRIPTS a
1 North Indian 27
2 South Indian 31

Sinhalese 34
Vv. SCRIPTS OF SOUTH-EAST ASIA 35
1 Mainland South-east Asia 35
Mon (Talaing or Peguan)
Burmese a7
Cambodian a7
Thai (Siamese)
Lao 39
Vietnamese 39
2 Island South-east Asia 40
3 Invented scripts of South-east Asia 41
Lolo and Moso 41

Vv
VI. THE CHINESE SYSTEM OF WRITING page 42
I Writing and language 42
Ay, Forms of the Chinese script 43
3 Korean and Tangut 44
4 Japanese 45
ft IST OF EXHIBITS 49
PLATES 73

vi
 LIST OF PLATES

Frontispiece. Khamseh of Nizami. Illuminated heading with calligraphic

Nasita‘lik. A.D. 1494-5. Or. 6810, 4r.
Pentateuch accompanied by the Masorah Magna and Parva. Square
Hebrew. Babylonian hand. Early roth century. Or. 4445, f. 98r.
A manuscript containing the Recognitions of Clement of Rome and
other works. Syriac. A.D. 412. Add. 12150, f. 171 f.
Sekiz Ytikmek. An apocryphal Buddhist sutra. Uighur. 8th century.
Or. 8212 (104), lines 82-102.
A fortune-telling manual. Old Turkish Runic. 8th—9th century. Or. 8212
(161), ff. 38v—39r.
Koran fragment on vellum. Arabic. Mashk script. 9th—-1oth century.
Or 1562, f 25%,
A richly illuminated copy of the Koran. Thulthi script. 14th century.
Or. 1401, ff. 32.v—33r4.
Divan of Hafiz Sa‘d. Persian. Nasta‘lik, script. A.D. 1459. Or. 11846,
ff. 66 v—67r.
Octateuch. Ethiopic. 15th century. Or. 480, f. roov.
Deuteronomy, Jonah and Acts. Coptic. Early 4th century. Or. 7594,
f. 108 Vv.
Io Asta-sahasrikaé Prajid-paramita. A Northern Buddhist work. Sanskrit,
in the Nepalese script. roth century. Or. 6902, ff. 14, 15, 16.
II Kalpasitra. A Jain religious work. Prakrit. A.D. 1464. Or. 5149, f. 54r.
z2 A folio from the first volume of the Kanjur or Tibetan Buddhist
canon. 18th century. Or. 6724.
13 The fourth book of Kampan’s Ramayanam.'Tamil. 19th century. Or. 2728,
Een
14 Phra malai. A Buddhist preaching text. Thai (Siamese), in Cambodian
script. 19th century. Add. 15347.
Tj Three of five letters of introduction from Mads Johannsen Lange to
five princes of Bali. Indonesian (Balinese). A.D. 1852. Or. 12971
(1-5).
16 A ‘study’ of the handwriting of Chao Méng-fu, and Tung Ch’i-ch’ang.
Chinese. Probably early 19th century. Or. 8625, f. 2¢.
17 King Sejong’s explanation of the Korean alphabet designed by him in
A.D. 1446. Facsimile of a blockprint. 16509.a.4.
18 Tsurezure-gusa. Essays of a recluse by Kenko Hoshi. A blockprint based
on calligraphy. Japanese. A.D. 1613. Or. 59.b.28.

vii
 PREFACE

The languages of the world have for centuries provided scholars with
a tich field for study and research. Of no less importance is the related
study of the scripts in which those languages have been recorded.
This Handbook is designed as a companion to the exhibition of
Asian scripts held in the King’s Library at the British Museum during
July and August 1966. It sets out to provide a background to the
exhibition by describing the principal systems of writing in use in Asia
and North Africa. It also briefly traces their origins and historical
development over the past two thousand years, with a glimpse at their
interrelation one with another and the basic unity underlying many of
them. It shows how certain scripts have travelled far from their place
of origin, becoming adapted and assimilated to the needs of quite
different languages on the way. Only the written languages of
ancient Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt have been excluded from the
present exhibition, as they are already well represented elsewhere in
the British Museum.
The compilers of this Handbook hope that it will not only provide
a guide to the exhibition but may also serve as a convenient short
summary of the writing systems of Asia after the exhibition has been
dispersed.
Thanks are due to the Keepers of Printed Books, Manuscripts,
Western Asiatic Antiquities, British and Medieval Antiquities and
Oriental Antiquities for lending material from their collections. We are
greatly indebted to Mr C. A. Russell for drawing the diagrams.
K. B. GARDNER
Keeper of Oriental Printed Books
and Manuscripts
January 1966

viii
 ip EN RODUGTIION

In the vast Asian and African land mass, many systems of writing are in
evetyday use by a large proportion of the world’s population. This
exhibition illustrates the main classes, and traces the outline of script
development over the last two millennia. Military and religious conquests
have played an important part in the diffusion of scripts, and numerous
adaptations and assimilations tend to obscure an original unity.
In all Asia there are very few independent systems of writing. If we
take the Hebrew alphabet as a starting-point, we must begin from the
form known as Phoenician or Canaanite, the origins of which are shown
in the exhibition in the Room of Writing. From Phoenician through the
spread of the Jewish and Christian religions, come Aramaic and Syriac,
and through Greek, Coptic. A much greater flight is the spread of the
Syriac form to Central Asia, where it represented a Turkish language,
then Mongol, and finally Manchu, changing direction from horizontal
to vertical. Central Asia, a rather vague frontier area, has used most of
the script systems, but until modern times the Roman alphabet was not
used. Now many newly-devised scripts are of the Roman or Cyrillic
type.
Another great religious movement, Islam, carried the Arabic script
as far as Malaysia, with slight adaptations for such varied languages as
Malay, Persian and Turkish. Principally a cursive script, Arabic has also
had an important influence on shorthand systems in our own culture.
Going back again to Aramaic, and comparing the forms with the
most ancient Indian system known to us, we find a striking similarity.
Even if the steps cannot now be demonstrated, there does seem to be
some link between a Semitic system and the Brahmi script. Religious,
political and cultural forces over three millennia gave a proliferation of
forms all derived from the one source, extending with the spread of
Buddhism into South-east Asia, where it came to be used even for
monosyllabic languages like Thai and Burmese. In early times the script
was used in Central Asia for languages distantly related to our own.
For the rest of Asia, the Chinese script has been in use, and remained
constant in form over a constant area, for two millennia, except for
present-day Vietnam and North Korea, which have adopted different
scripts for their national cultures. Japan and South Korea have adopted
double systems in which the main ideas are represented in Chinese
characters.
By I BMA
 Whereas in Europe spelling has changed with national idioms, or
with the evolution of a single language, the Chinese characters have
remained constant while the Chinese language evolved, so that they can
be ‘read’ according to the dialect, or borrowed by other languages.
The basis of the script was pictorial, but the pictures have been
formalised, used as phonetic symbols for similar-sounding words,
combined with other elements denoting meaning, and reduced to a unit
character for each syllable. To think of Chinese in terms of pictures
would be the same as construing English by etymology.
It goes without saying that the original ‘near-phonetics’ are no
longer pronounced the same, so that a character is learnt with its
modern sound and its meanings.
In Japanese the pronunciation of the Chinese character depends on
the context. A two-syllable noun is likely to be pronounced as a
borrowing from Chinese, while a verb is represented by a single
Chinese character, provided with a phonetic complement as a clue to
the Japanese pronunciation.
True pictographs ate rare in Asian scripts. Moso, used by one of the
Yi peoples of South-west China, is the only example shown.
Independent inventions are also rare, but significant in the history of
writing. Batak shows a logical simplification of a syllabary, Korean has
the only independently invented alphabet, and Tangut has a composite
ideographic unit monosyllable. Georgian and Armenian are both highly
inventive adaptations.
Writing materials have tended to shape the script. Usually the
standard derives from an elegant stone inscription, but the stylus on a
palm leaf tends to a circular base-form (Burmese), a reed pen gives
thick horizontals (Square Hebrew and Sanskrit), while the brushstrokes
of a famous calligrapher become sharp-pointed under the knife of a
wood-block cutter (Chinese).
Beside the standard script there is always a running hand for every-
day use, a monumental style for inscriptions, and in the hand of the
attist-calligrapher, an aesthetic creation that can be enjoyed down
through the centuries. Examples of monumental script and calligraphy
ate usually too large to exhibit, but wherever possible the best manu-
sctipts are shown.
The arrangement of the exhibition is broadly geographical. From the
central upright cases Aramaic, Brahmi and Archaic Chinese diverge
both historically and geographically, while the no-man’s-land of
Central Asia represents the meeting-point of all Asian cultures.
 Il, THE SEMITIC ALPHABET
1. PALAEO-HEBREW AND SAMARITAN
(Case T)
Among the many systems of writing devised by man, undoubtedly the
most useful and practical is the alphabet, in which an attempt is made to
record the sound of a word by the use of symbols representing the
distinctive sounds or ‘phonemes’ of a language. This is a great advance
on any system using pictographs or ideograms and limits the number
of symbols to the number of ‘phonemes’ of the language. The early
Semitic alphabet only represented consonants, using twenty-two letters.
In this alphabet the sounds of the letters for the most part represent the
initial sound of the name of the object originally represented by the
letter. Thus the second letter of the alphabet represents house, ber, so
the sound of this letter is ). But not every letter has so far been satis-
factorily explained in this way.
Our present English alphabet, which was taken over from Latin and
which at an even earlier stage of development was used for writing
Greek, was derived from the ancient North Semitic alphabet and it is
in forms of this script that Hebrew, Samaritan, Arabic and Syriac, to
name only a few languages, are written. Only one major Semitic
language did not use the alphabet, Accadian, whose cuneiform writing
was specifically adapted to writing on moist clay.
The origins of this alphabet are exceedingly obscure and lie largely
outside the scope of this exhibition, since the earliest material is mostly
written on stone or pottery, and is interestingly and informatively
displayed in the ‘Room of Writing’ in the Department of Western
Asiatic Antiquities.
Some account, however, of the early days of the Semitic alphabet is
necessary and the first thing to be pointed out is the division into South
Semitic and North Semitic, a division which is evident from the earliest
times. What the common origin of these scripts is has been a matter of
considerable debate but it is generally agreed that Egyptian hieroglyphs
and the inscriptions carved by Egyptian miners in the Sinai area played
an important part. The situation is well stated by G. R. Driver, who
suggested ‘that the South-Semitic and North-Semitic alphabets were
influenced by the Egyptian hieroglyphs, possibly through a common
ancestor or ancestors, and wete evolved in their earliest stages in close
3 I-2
contact with one-another. The intermediate link may have been the
Sinaitic and probably also some early Canaanite form of the North-
Semitic alphabet that preceded its branching off into the specific
Phoenician and Aramaic, Hebrew and Moabite alphabets’ (Semztic
Writing, London, 1954, page 147). The earliest stage of the North
Semitic alphabet must have been in the first half of the second millen-
nium s.c., for by the second half we have the earliest connected
Phoenician inscriptions coming from Byblos near Beirut.
In Canaan the earliest intelligible connected inscription is the Gezer
Calendar, probably dating from the eleventh century B.c. (the period of
Saul and David of the Bible). The script is very similar to the Phoenician
though each of these developed more cursive forms, i.e. forms more
easily written, especially with the pen, as time went on. This is clearly
seen in our earliest example exhibited, one of the Lachish ostraca or
potsherds used like scraps of notepaper, and which date from the fall
of the city of Lachish to Nebuchadrezzar about 587 B.c. This in fact is
relatively late in the history of what is called the Palaeo- (or early)
Hebrew script which by the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls (the last few
centuries B.c.) had gone out of use except for the practice in some
manuscripts of using it to write the divine name yHwu. Fragments of
the book of Exodus in the Palaeo-Hebrew script have also been found
at Qumran but by this time Hebrew was normally written in a form of
the Aramaic script, another branch of the North Semitic alphabet,
which had developed into what is commonly known as ‘Square
Hebrew’.
The Palaeo-Hebrew script was revived on coins of the Maccabaean
and Bar Kokhba period (¢a. 140 B.C.—A.D. 135) and then died out as a
Jewish script. The Samaritans, however, used a form of the Palaeo-
Hebrew script from the earliest days of the sect until the present. There
is very little discernible development in the Samaritan script though this
is no doubt due to the scarcity of early material, since the bulk of
Samaritan material remaining to us was copied in the present millen-
nium. There are two quite distinct styles of writing, however, the
Majuscule which is bold, angular and elegant and the Minuscule
derived from it though not very clearly. The latter is quite cursive and
can be very difficult to read. A modern cursive hand is shown along
with a very elegant manuscript in the Majuscule character.
Mention has been made of the Jewish use of the Aramaic script. An
older example of this is to be seen in the fifth century B.c. papyrus
fragment from Elephantine, an island on the Nile near Assuan. The
Aramaic script is a main branch of the North Semitic alphabet, the
other branch being Canaanite which has already been mentioned.
4
Aramaic writing goes back to the early centuries of the first millen-
nium B.c. and by the second half of that millennium had become the
most widespread and important script of the Near East. It was used by
the western provinces of the Persian Empire as its diplomatic script and
continued in use here and there until about the second century A.D.
The Aramaic language, however, in both Western and Eastern (Syriac)
varieties, has continued to be spoken to the present day in villages in
the neighbourhood of Damascus, Mosul and Lake Urmia. The script
developed by the Jews in Palestine for writing Hebrew as in the Dead
Sea Scrolls is a variety of the Aramaic script influenced by the Palaeo-
Hebrew script and becoming standardised just before the beginning of
the Christian era. This is the well-known Hebrew ‘square’ script dealt
with in another section.
The Aramaic script is important not only in itself but for the scripts
derived from it, notably Arabic via Nabataean, Syriac, Mandaic and the
scripts of many non-Semitic languages of Asia and India.

2) 1H ARAMAIC SCRIPT AND:ILTS

EARLIER DERIVATIVES
HEBREW

(Cases 3-5)
The Square Hebrew script as it is still employed today is derived from
the Aramaic. In the period before the Babylonian Exile, Hebrew was
the language of the Jews in Palestine and they wrote in the early or
Palaeo-Hebrew script. A marked change, however, took place in the
post-exilic age. With the spread of Aramaic as the /ingua franca of the
Near Hast and the return of the Jews, who had adopted it during the
Babylonian Exile, Aramaic gradually became the vernacular of the Jews
in Palestine. Under the Achaemenid dynasty, when the Aramaic script
became the official hand of the vast Persian Empire, the Palaeo-Hebrew
ceased little by little to be the script of daily use and was restricted to the
writing of the Sacred Scriptures. Although employed concurrently with
the new script for some centuries, the Palaeo-Hebrew alphabet was
gradually superseded by the Aramaic.
After the fall of Persia and the introduction of Greek for official
purposes, the local Aramaic scripts tend to differentiate. The three sister
scripts—Hebrew, Nabataean and Palmyrene—branch off from the
Aramaic patent script to follow their own course of development. By
the late third and early second centuries B.c., a distinctive Palestinian
Jewish variety of the Aramaic script can be traced which may be
5
regarded as the prototype of what subsequently came to be known as
the K*thabh Ashshiri, ‘the Assyrian script’ or the K*thabh M’rubba*, the
Hebrew ‘Square’ script, which basically has remained unchanged to
the present day.
Until recently the material at hand for the study of the evolution of
the Hebrew script, especially in its early stages, was rather scanty. Our
resources, however, have been substantially increased by the discovery
of a large quantity of manuscripts in the Judean Desert, the famous
Dead Sea Scrolls. The caves of Wadi Qumran have yielded a collection
of biblical and sectarian manuscripts, on leather and papyrus, ranging in
date from about mid-third century B.c. to the late first century A.D., thus
ereatly expanding our knowledge of the evolution of the Hebrew script.
We have here fragments of the oldest biblical manuscript in existence
(4QEx‘), written in a proto-cursive script of the mid-third century B.c.
as well as the earliest known example of the Hebrew Square script,
fragments of a Samuel Scroll (4QSam»), dated to the late third century
B.C. Other stages of development of Hebrew writing are illustrated by
manusctipts assigned to the Hasmonean and Herodian periods. An
extension of the material from Qumran is afforded by important docu-
ments and texts of the late first and early second centuries a.p. found in
the region of Wadi Murabba‘at. They include for the first time dated
material enabling us to attribute the whole group to the time of Bar
Kokhba, the leader in the Second Jewish Revolt against the Romans
(A.D. 132-35), and contributing greatly to the establishment of a sequence
of evolution of Hebrew writing.
In the evolution of the Hebrew Square script the following phases
can be distinguished. In the early phase (¢a. 200-150 B.C.) the script is
related to the Elephantine papyri of the fifth century B.c. and the
contemporary Aramaic papyri found at Edft in Egypt. It is square in
character but archaic in that it shows a wide differentiation in the size of
the letters, a characteristic of the Aramaic hands of the fifth and fourth
centuries B.c. The real formative period is the Hasmonean phase
(ca. 150-30 B.C.). With the decline of Greek and the resurgence of
Aramaic and especially Hebrew as the official languages of Judaea in
the era of the Maccabaean rule, a characteristic style rapidly develops
from the early book hand. The letters still differ in size but there is a
tendency to uniformity. In the Herodian phase (ca. 30 B.C.—A.D. 70) the
script finally attains uniformity in size and a constant shape of letters,
the use of final and medial forms, with some exceptions, being strictly
observed. The evolution of the script in that period is very swift, so
that early and late Herodian formal hands are easily distinguished. The
elegant formal hand of the early Herodian period inclines to delicate,
6
thin-lined forms, whereas the script of the late Herodian period exhibits
a characteristic thick ductus and a squat form. The letters, normally
large, have pronounced thickened heads which later become a charac-
teristic feature of the Hebrew script. In the biblical manuscripts from
Murabba‘at of the post-Herodian period (¢a. A.D. 70-130) this ‘orna-
mental’ script, slightly developed, is widely used for copying the
Scriptures and is also attested by some non-literary documents. It is
this stylised formal hand which becomes the archetype of the medieval
official biblical book hand. After the destruction of Jerusalem and the
establishment of the Canon of the Bible, the standardisation of the text
reaches its final stage and the ‘canonisation’ of the script for biblical
manuscripts takes place. In contrast with the swift evolution of the
script in the preceding three centuries, the standardised script hence-
forth undergoes little change. Detailed rules concerning the copying of
Synagogue scrolls and the manner in which they should be set out grew
up, preventing further development. Not until later in the Byzantine
period were these rules written down, but we can now see that the
later ‘Massoretic’ or Received Text and the rules concerning its trans-
mission had practically attained their final form already at the beginning
of the second century.
In common with other Semitic languages, the Hebrew alphabet
consists of consonants only, which makes the reading in many cases
ambiguous. To obviate such ambiguity various methods were developed.
At first some of the consonants (d/eph, hé, vav, yodh) served as both
consonants and vowels. But since these vowel-letters or matres lec-
tionis were not sufficient to mark all the different vowel sounds,
especially as Hebrew speech passed out of daily use, a method of indi-
cating vowels by separate signs added to the consonants began to
develop parallel with similar attempts in other Semitic languages,
notably Syriac and Arabic. Three distinct systems of Hebrew vocalisa-
and
tion developed, the Palestinian and Babylonian (both supralinear)
the
that known as the Tiberian (sublinear) which eventually superseded
others and is the one used today.
have
Very few codices exhibiting the early systems of vocalisation
ed mainly in the
survived but a number of fragments have been preserv
the period
Cairo Genizah. Hardly any Hebrew manuscripts remain from
(second century A.D.) and the ninth
between the Murabba‘at finds
great biblical codices of the
century. This brings us to the period of the
ipt, which not
ninth and tenth centuries. A fine and important manuscr
exhibits a
only exemplifies the Tiberian type of vocalisation but also
Middle
distinctive calligraphic style of script for biblical codices in the
codices in
Ages, is MS. Or. 4445. It is one of the earliest biblical
7
 existence, and is assigned to the early tenth century. By this time two
other significant styles of writing were developing from the Square
Hebrew script—the ‘Rabbinic’ and the cursive scripts. The Rabbinic
ot Mashait is a smaller semi-cursive script. Originally used for com-
mentaties and marginal notes, it later became the medieval literary
hand. It is of a somewhat rounded character with the heads of the
letters smaller or disappearing altogether and with modification of some
of the letters, making it more easily and rapidly written. Though there
is not always a clear distinction between the Rabbinic and cursive hand,
the cursive is a more current hand whose primary purpose has always
been fot popular general handwriting and notes. From the Middle
Ages, with the wide diffusion of Hebrew literature throughout the
Jewish Diaspora, the development of these three styles of script has
been according to regions, and within any region the local national
script has tended to influence the Hebrew script. In Europe Hebrew
penmanship was brought first to the countries of the southern coast,
more especially to Italy and Spain, and spread thence into France,
Germany and other countries, assuming various modifications in its
course. With the Sephardi (Oriental-Spanish) Jews the Hebrew alphabet
is distinguished by its roundness and by the small difference in thickness
of the horizontal and vertical strokes. A fine example of a Spanish
Hebrew square script is MS. Or. 2626-8, a Hebrew Bible written in
Lisbon in 1482 A.D. Among the Ashkenazi (Franco-German) Jews, the
script is more angular with thinner down-strokes and with bent and
pointed lines (Add. 14762). Holding a midway position between these
two main regional styles are the Italian (Add. 15423) and Southern
French hands, which, though having a character of their own, are
closer to the rounded Sephardi forms. The differences visible in the
squate alphabets are much mote apparent in the Rabbinic scripts of
various countries and centuries.
From a variety of local cursive scripts, that of the nineteenth-century
Polish-German Jews has gained supremacy as the standard Hebrew
handwriting of Israel and the Jews in general. The Hebrew alphabet
has also been used by the Jews from an early period for writing such
languages as Persian, Arabic, Spanish (Ladino), Greek, Turkish,
Italian, Old French, German and Yiddish.
4YV YL

> AMHARIC

ryYry yn
+

4
an
ETHIOPIC {7

NORTH
SEMITIC
ALPHABET

THE DESCENDANTS OF
Bue NORTH SEMITIC ALPHABET

Page 9 of
A Handbook of Asian Scripts, edited by R. F. Hosking
and G. M. Meredith-Owens. London: The British
Museum, 1966.
 PAHLAVI
(Case I)
The Aramaic language had become widespread in the Achaemenid
empite, and when once more a dynasty of Iranian stock ruled over
Persia, the Aramaic alphabet was used to write Middle Persian of
Pahlavi. The gradual reduction of the twenty-two consonants of the
Aramaic script to only fourteen made the writing one of the most
imperfect and ambiguous ever known. For example, one and the same
letter stood for 7, 2 and w, and the signs for a and / wete identical. In
addition to this there wete various ligatures and Pahlavi was encumbered
by a system known as Uzpdrishn in which obsolete Aramaic words were
used as ideograms to exptess Pahlavi words. Thus the royal title
Shabanshab ‘King of Kings’ was written m/k’n-mlk’ (malkan-malka); and
nan ‘bread’ was expressed by the Aramaic /hm’ (/ahma).
The eatliest variety of the Pahlavi alphabet, the Pahlavik or North-
western, is also called Arsacid, after the name of the Parthian dynasty
which reigned from 248 3.c. to A.D. 226. It appears mainly on coins
and seals of this period. The South-western Pahlavi or Parsik is usually
known as Sasanian. This was the name of the line of kings which over-
threw the Parthians and reigned until the Arab conquest. The writing
of the South-western Pahlavi has a form for monumental inscriptions
and a cursive hand. Of the Eastern Pahlavi, however, only a cursive
form is known.
An improved version of the Pahlavi script called Avestan was
evolved for the Zoroasttian scriptures which are in an archaic Iranian
dialect. This was a gteat improvement on the Pahlavi and its fifty
characters were better adapted to express an Indo-European language.
The earliest manuscripts in this language have come down to us from
the Parsees of India and are not earlier than the thirteenth century. The
document on parchment in Pahlavi (Or. 8115) is a certification before
witnesses of the sale of a vineyard and dates from the first century B.C.

SYRIAC
(Case 2)
Centring round Edessa, Syriac was for many centuries the language of
the Christians of North Syria and Mesopotamia and the Christian East
in general. Along with Mandaic and the language of the Babylonian
Talmud it belongs to the Aramaic branch of the Semitic family of
languages. The Syriac scripts, too, are derived from the Aramaic, the
earliest Syriac script having an especially close relationship to a cursive
10
sctipt found in some Palmyrene inscriptions of the second and third
centuries of the Christian era.
This early script is known as Estrangela. It is a very beautiful, bold
and elegant script, as can be seen from the exhibit in Case 2 (Add.
12150), which is the oldest dated Syriac manuscript known (A.D. 411)
and probably the oldest dared codex still extant in any language. But the
earliest examples of Estrangela script appear on coins from Edessa of
the first century A.D., and the fact that the script had been used for four
centuries before the earliest manuscripts appear may account for the
beauty and clarity the script had developed by that time. It continued
in use with fluctuations in popularity until the thirteenth century, since
when it has been virtually extinct.
The rival of this script, which ultimately led to its disappearance, was
the Jacobite or Serta script, the earliest dated codex in which is dated
A.D. 731-2 and contains the Gospel of John. In Case 2 (Add. 14548) is
a vety early example of the Jacobite script, being dated A.D. 790. This
script was both graceful and easily written, a factor which no doubt gave
it an advantage over the Estrangela form. It was extensively used down
to the end of the sixteenth century.
After the Council of Ephesus in a.p. 431 those Syriac-speaking
Christians who followed the Nestorian doctrine separated from their
more orthodox brethren and formed a distinct church organisation. As
a result of this division the Estrangela script developed along different
lines which became apparent by the end of the sixth century. By the
middle of the thirteenth century cursive forms began to appear giving
rise to a distinctive Nestorian script which has continued in use down
to the present day. The example exhibited is the ‘Bazaar of Heraclides’,
a work of prime importance in the Nestorian controversy.
The Nestorian Church was a great missionary church with the result
that Syriac inscriptions have been found as far afield as Sian in Central
China, where Nestorian Christianity flourished in the seventh and
eighth centuries. The Nestorians also took Christianity to South India
where to this day Syriac is used as a liturgical language and books are
printed in Syriac type. Yet another group of Syriac-speaking Christians
evolved their own form of the Syriac script, the Melkites of Palestine.
The Melkites accepted the doctrine of the person of Christ as formu-
lated at the Council of Chalcedon in A.p. 451 and those in Palestine had
their own liturgy and version of the scriptures which they wrote in
their own rather stiff and angular variety of the Estrangela character,
using the addition of a special character to represent p in words of
foreign origin. In its earliest form this script is strongly influenced by
the Greek Uncial character. Not much of this survives but a good
II
specimen of the tenth or eleventh century is exhibited in Case 2
(Add. 14664). The oldest dated example of this script was copied in
Antioch in A.D. 1030.
MANDAIC
(Case 2)
The Mandaeans of Iraq, a gnostic sect with pagan, Jewish and Christian
elements in their religion, possess a literature written in an Eastern
Aramaic dialect somewhat influenced by Persian and Arabic. This
language, Mandaic, is written in a script which seems to be derived
from a cutsive Aramaic script probably with some influence from
Syriac. There are some quite old Mandaic inscriptions on lead and in
earthenware bowls dating from the seventh and eighth centuries, but
most of the available material is in manuscripts of the seventeenth,
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Examples of both an early inscrip-
tion on lead and a manuscript of the later period are shown.
The early history of the Mandaeans is extremely obscure, but a small
number of them still exists in southern Iraq, in the marsh districts of the
Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

3. CENTRAL ASIAN SCRIPTS DEVELOPED

FROM THE ARAMAIC
(Case 19)
SOGDIAN
The Persian religious leader Mani (d. a.p. 276) himself improved the
faulty and ambiguous Middle Persian writing by introducing the Syriac
alphabet which he adapted successfully to Pahlavi. The cumbrous old
ideograms (Uzvarishn) were largely abandoned and the new writing was
used for Sogdian from which it spread to the Turkish peoples of Central
Asia.
Sogdian, an Iranian language, used an alphabet of seventeen letters
with two more special signs, every letter being written separately. At a
later date the writing became very cursive as in the Uighur, the
Turkish alphabet derived from the Sogdian. Buddhist works were
written in a later and slightly different version of the Sogdian writing.
It was less legible than the earlier script when and x were apt to be
confused; now, to make matters worse, the signs for gh and k/ were
practically identical. In all there were three scripts—one used for
Buddhist works and ordinary purposes, another by the Manichaeans
and a third for Christian texts.
2
 The earliest Sogdian manuscript on exhibition is Or. 8212 (95), one
of a bundle of letters sent by merchants in China to their head offices at
Samarkand. The date corresponds to June a.p. 313 in view of the
events mentioned in it which were then of current interest. At this time
the Sogdians were Zoroastrians but some were later converted to
Buddhism. A fragment of a story about the Persian hero Rustam is
written in this later Buddhist Sogdian alphabet (Or. 8212 (81)).
Another letter, Or. 8212 (86), is an example of cursive Sogdian.

UIGHUR

Sogdian in its latest form was the parent of the Uighur writing, ptob-
ably in the eighth century a.p. The Uighur letters were used by the
Turkish Buddhists of Chinese Turkestan for neatly a thousand years.
The latest manuscript, now in a Russian collection, is dated 1687. It
was never a very good instrument for writing Turkish, especially when
the dots which distinguished certain letters were omitted. Uighur
usually reads from right to left, but when it is written in columns
reading from the top downwards, it reads from left to right.
Early Uighur is a handsome script. Or. 8212 (104), which was
discovered at Tunhuang, is a fine example from this early period. It
contains a popular but apocryphal Buddhist sutra called Sekix Yiikmek.
The later development of this writing into a cursive hand is shown in
Or. 8212 (109) which bears a Chinese date in a year period corres-
ponding to A.D. 1350. The work is a Buddhist religious book of tantric
content, translated almost literally from the Tibetan.
When the Turks of Kashgar and areas to the west of it were converted
to Islam, they abandoned the Uighur alphabet in favour of the Arabic.
The Uighur script was not forgotten, however, and even underwent a
revival under rather peculiar circumstances. Until the late twelfth
century, Mongol had never been a written language, but when Chingiz
Khan became a world conqueror, he decided that he must have an
official alphabet. He commissioned a learned Uighur to devise one for
him out of his own writing. Thus Uighur became the common hand
not only for Mongol under the Mongol rulers but also for Turkish
under the Turkish or Turkish-speaking viceroys who carved kingdoms
for themselves out of the ruins of the Mongol Empire. This revival in
Western Asia lasted from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries.
Or. 8193 is probably the finest extant example of this ‘second’
Uighur alphabet. It is a miscellany containing poems and religious
works written and illuminated for a Turkish prince in the Persian city
of Yezd in a.D. 1431-2. The calligraphy is very fine but the alphabet has
deteriorated as a vehicle for expressing sounds.
33
 The Turkic languages are remarkable for the variety of scripts they
have employed over the centuries. In addition to the Uighur and
Sogdian letters, they have used the Indian Brahmi, the Tibetan and a
special kind of Syriac writing adapted to Turkish. The latter is some-
what clearer than Uighur but was used only by the Manichaeans. The
example shown in Case 3 is an almost complete copy of the Khwastanéft
ot Manichaean Confession of Sins (Or. 8212 (178)). Sometimes Uighur
was printed from wood blocks as in contemporary Chinese books.

OLD TURKISH RUNIC

The earliest specimens of written Turkish are inscriptions on memorial

stones scattered over Southern Siberia and Mongolia which date from
the early eighth century a.p. These ate written in an alphabet usually
called ‘Runic’ because its letters resembled the Germanic runes,
although there is no relationship between the two. There does, how-
evet, seem to be a connection with a script found in a few inscriptions
in Transylvania and Southern Hungary called Sxekkr. The Turkish
Runic alphabet was constructed by the Turks on the late Aramaic script,
but there was clearly another source as well—possibly a degenerated
version of the Greek alphabet. There is thus a parallel here with the
Germanic tunes, which ate said to have originated in a garbled Latin
script used by the Goths. The Turkish Runic alphabet was an advanced
scientific script with thirty letters and five to six ligatures. Even though
it left out almost all the short vowels and some letters did duty for two
different sounds, it was the best system of writing used by the Turkic
peoples until the adoption of the Latin alphabet in 1928.
The earliest of the Runic Turkish manuscripts in the British Museum
collection belongs probably to a period before a.D. 770. It is a return of
receipts into the quartermaster’s store of such things as breastplates and
swords, and their issue to people with Turkish names or Chinese titles
(Or. 8212 (76)). The manuscript is now in three fragments. A collection
of proverbs (Or. 8212 (78—-9)) is also in fragments but what remains
indicates that it is the finest manuscript in the collection from a calli-
gtaphic point of view. Another fine example of Runic Turkish is
Or. 8212 (161), a fortune-telling manual intended to be used with dice
ot knuckle-bones. The runes were written from right to left.

MONGOL

The Mongols used the Uighur as their official language and script until
1272 when an adaptation of the Tibetan writing called Hpags-pa (Pa-sse-
pain Mongol) was adopted for the Mongol language. This was replaced
by a new script founded on the Uighur about 1310. The new Mongol
14
CENTRALSASIAN SCRIPTS ) V
DERIVED FROM THE /\
ARAMAIC Oe

<<, Ce

TEAS
VY
ee eS
vy — BS a (
ANI- A UIGHUR
VESTAN Maran
UIGHUR ) A oy Ik

uk SOGDIAN
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Oy a

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PAHLAVI C) » U)eae

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CURSIVE

ARAMAIC

GA ORC
 alphabet (Kalika or Galik) was used in the translations of the Buddhist
scriptures and became widespread. It is written vertically ina downward
direction like Chinese but the columns run from left to right. Like so
many of the alphabets derived from the Aramaic, it has many imper-
fections—some letters (e.g. g and k, d and ¢, 0 and 4, and y and /) are
written alike and Mongol is a language with many vowels like Turkish
which ate not adequately expressed by the script.
Case 10 contains a copy of the Meng-ku-tzu-yiin (Ot. 6972) which is a
Mongol-Chinese dictionary of rhymes, copied in the fourteenth century
using the Pa-sse-pa script. Before this date, however, the script was
falling into disuse except in the case of seal inscriptions. Add. 27568 is
a leaf from a Mongol book, showing the customary form of the Ka/ika
script. It was probably copied in the eighteenth century.
The Mongol script reached the neighbouring people of Manchuria
and was adapted to the Manchu language. It was improved in 1632 by
the addition of’some diacritical points. In 1748 the Manchu (Ch’ing)
Emperor of China, Ch’ien-lung, reformed the Manchu writing.
Or. 6790 is part of the official history of the Manchu dynasty, compiled
by the state historiographers. ‘This volume (41 of the history) deals with
the year 1852.
The Kalmyks, a branch of the Mongols, adapted the Ka/ika script to
their own dialect in 1648. In general it was a great improvement on the
otdinary Mongol writing. At a later date the Buryat Mongols took over
the Kalika alphabet. A collection of vocabularies arranged according to
subject in Manchu, Chinese and Kalmyk (Or. 6975) is dated about 1700.
These alphabets based on the Uighur continued in use until 1941
when the Russian Cyrillic letters, with some modifications, were intro-
duced by the Russians for writing Mongol, as well as for the modern
Turkic languages. In China, on the other hand, the older type of writing
still survives.

4, ARABIC
(Cases 7-9)
What is known today as Arabic script is more precisely North Arabic,
and it is now generally agreed that this way of writing was developed
from an alphabet used by the Nabataeans, an Arab people living to the
north, east and south of Sinai. The Nabataeans used both Arabic and
Aramaic, but their written language was mainly Aramaic. The oldest
Arabic inscription that we have in Nabataean characters is dated A.D. 267.
The Arabs appear to have had little use for writing and they are by no
means the only example that the ancient world has to offer of a highly
16
language-conscious and poetically gifted people who were mostly
illiterate. The Arab poets preferred to hand down their compositions
by living word of mouth and each poet had at least two youths specially
chosen for this purpose.
But with the coming of Islam, the need to record every syllable of the
Koran with absolute precision imposed writing on the seventh-century
Arabs and changed it from being an almost unnecessary side-line to an
accomplishment of the highest importance. Moreover, since Islam dis-
couraged the painting of pictures, the Arabs began to put much of their
genius into calligraphy; and within less than two centuries after the
beginning of Islam they had developed a calligraphic art which has
never been surpassed.
In pre-Islamic times two different kinds of Arabic script had already
developed, one ‘static’ and angular, and the other cursive and round.
This last still continued to be used in Islam for ordinary ends, as is
shown by the Egyptian passport on papyrus, dated A.H. 133 (A.D. 750),
in Case 13. But the more monumental angular lettering was preferred
for copying the Koran and other important purposes, and it was not
long before several kinds of calligraphic script were developed from it,
one in Mecca, for example, another in Medina, another in Kufa and yet
another in Basra. Examples of Meccan and Kufic script, and of a
derivative from each, are also to be seen in Case 13.
Meantime, since the Semitic alphabets do not include vowels, a
system of placing vowel marks above or below the letters had been
adopted on analogy with those used in Syriac script—Syriac being the
liturgical language of the Arab Christians of those parts. The use of dia-
critical points to distinguish between otherwise identical letters had
been previously adopted from Syriac.
The rounder, more cursive scripts by which the more angular scripts
gradually came to be replaced for calligraphic purposes were developed
directly from the angular scripts themselves and not from the already
existing ordinary cursive hand. The presence of this hand may none the
less have had a general influence on the development in question.
Between the square ‘static’ and the round cursive is a ‘triangular’
cursive script that is generally called ‘bent Kufic’ or ‘semi-Kufic’.
This makes its appearance about A.D. 900. One or two examples, on
vellum and also on paper, are to be seen in Case 7 together with a
Koran of the year A.H. 427 (A.D. 1036), copied in a round hand which
still retains a certain angularity.
By the time the Abbasid Caliphate was established in Baghdad in
A.D. 750, calligraphy was well on its way to becoming one of the great
atts of Islam. Among the most famous Near Eastern calligraphers were
2 bt BMA
Ibn Mukla (A.D. 886-940), Ibn al-Bawwab (d.1022) and Yakut
(d. 1298). By them and others many kinds of rounded cursive script,
such as Thuluth and Naskhi, were perfected. Most of the Arabic manu-
sctipts shown in this exhibition are Korans, since they provide the finest
and most distinctive examples of calligraphy. Some thirteenth—four-
teenth-century Korans from Egypt, Palestine and Iraq are to be seen in
Case 9. Most of these represent variants of that style of Tha/uth which
is known as Ja/i/. It should be noted, however, that these rounder
hands did not completely supersede the more angular ones which are
still used to this day for stone and metal inscriptions, and which have
been used throughout the centuries in books for such features as
chapter headings. Examples of such headings are to be seen in some of
these late medieval Near Eastern Koran manuscripts; and in Case 8 is
a printed book, published in 1965 in Lebanon, which has no less than
five different styles of lettering on the title-page, one of them being, as is
often the case, archaic and angular.
What has been said so far applies only to writing in the Near East.
But in less than a hundred years after the Prophet’s death the empire of
Islam had spread to the Bay of Biscay in the west and to India and the
confines of China in the east; and within this vast Islamic civilisation
differences of race, temperament, climate and other factors inevitably
brought into being several little civilisations, each a homogeneous
whole in itself with its own special characteristics. One of these little
‘worlds’ was the Islamic civilisation of North-west Africa and Spain,
which quickly developed a unique style of architecture and, side by side
with it, a unique style of Arabic script known as Maghribi, which means
‘Western’. It is perhaps not too fanciful to say that the honey-combed
Andalusian and Moroccan architecture, with its extraordinary combina-
tion of airy lightness, robust vigour and inviting intimacy, is reflected
in the Maghribi script. Analogously, the Arabic scripts developed in
India are an integral part of that particular Islamic ‘world’. The same
may be said also of Central West African Arabic script, which was
developed later from the Maghribi but which differs from it with some-
thing of the difference between the black race and the white. In Case 8
there are examples of Arabic written by Maghribi, Indian and Nigerian
calligraphers.
As regards writing, Persia and Turkey may be counted as part of the
Islamic Near East, and some examples of Arabic script which are used
by the Arabs, but which are not represented in the cases devoted to
Arabic, may be seen in Turkish and Persian manuscripts (Cases 10-11).

18
 PERSIAN AND TURKISH

(Cases IO-IT)
With the rise of Islam, the Arabic script spread over a vast area and
gradually superseded other systems of writing which were in use among
the newly-conquered peoples. Among these was the Pahlavi alphabet
which appears alongside Arabic on the earliest Islamic coins of Persia
but soon died out except among those Persians who adhered to the
ancient Zoroastrian faith. It was found necessary to modify some of the
Arabic letters to express sounds not found in Arabic (e.g. p, ch, g and
xh) by the addition of diacritical points but these were not much used
until after the reign of Shah Rukh (1404-47).
The two earliest Persian manuscripts in the Arabic character are the
well-known Kitab ul-adviyeh of Abii Mansir Muvaffak al-Haravi at
Vienna which bears the date A.H. 447 (A.D. 105 5—6) and a medical work
at Oxford dated 478/1085. The first of these is in an angular script very
close to Kufic; the second is in a Naskhi hand indistinguishable from
those used in Arabic manuscripts of that period. There is a tendency
among Persian copyists to write with a slope downwards from right to
left which first occurs in some manuscripts of the twelfth century. Thus
the Ta‘/ik script developed which was at first used only for secular
works, particularly poems, while the round Naskhi was retained in mote
serious works.
Case 10 contains examples of early Persian manuscripts in the Arabic
script. Or. 6288 is the second earliest dated Persian manuscript in the
British Museum. It is a translation of an Arabic work on hygiene
entitled Takwim al-sibhah by Ibn Butlan and is dated 5 17/1123. The hand
is a very stiff Naskhi and should be compared with the more cursive
script of Or. 7942 (Divan of Khakani, dated 664/1265—6) which is of a
type usually employed for writing poetry and shows, surprisingly
enough, a fairly consistent use of the diacritical points. In Case 12 the
beginnings of the Ta‘/ik script are to be seen in Or. 6410, a deed for
the sale of land from Khotan, dated 501/1107-8. The same vowel points
ate used as in Arabic but they appear only very occasionally; usually
only the long vowels are indicated in Persian.
Or. 11398 (Divan of Salman i Savaji, dated 794/1393) shows a further
stage in the development of Ta‘/ik (which from now on is called
Nasta‘lik). This script first appears in its finest and most artistic form
towards the middle of the fifteenth century. The Divan of Hafiz Sa‘d
(Or. 11846) is a fine example of calligraphy, executed for the library of
Pir Badak, the son of the Turkoman ruler Jahanshah Karakoyunlu, at
I9 2-2
Shiraz in 864/1459. A mote perfected form of Nasta‘lik is to be seen in
Or. 4124 (two poems of Hilali) copied by the well-known calligrapher,
Sultan Muhammad Nar, in 957/15 50.
The Nasta‘lik script is still the dominant script in Muslim India.
Early examples are very rare. One of these is an anthology of Indian poets
writing in Persian (Or. 4110) which is of fifteenth-century date. In general,
Indian Nas/a‘/ikwas larger and less legible than Persian but itis notalways
easy to determine whether a particular specimen of script is from India.
The last phase in Persian writing was the evolution of the Shikasteh
(literally ‘broken’) script from Nasta‘/ik with the omission of diacritical
points and the linking together of various letters which are not normally
joined. An example of this cursive hand used for diplomatic corres-
pondence is Or. 4679 (dated 1272/1855-6) which comprises copies of
various treaties and conventions concluded by the Persian government
with other countries. Or. 2953 (Vamik u ‘Agra of Nami, dated 1262/
1845-6) is a good example of the hand known as Shikasteh-dmiz which
is a mixtute of Nasta‘/ik with more cursive forms. Shikasteh is the basic
script for handwriting at the present day but it frequently inclines
towards Shikasteh-amiz. Various ornamental hands were devised for the
use of calligraphers inelegant correspondence. Add. 27271 is an example
of one of these—the Tarassul hand, and is dated 1225/1810-11. It
resembles the Divani script which appears in Persian documents for the
first time towards the end of the fifteenth century.
It is always difficult to assign a Persian hand to a particular locality or
to be specific about its date. Generally speaking, a small neat Nasta‘lik
appears in manuscripts copied at Shiraz ca. 1430-40; and after 1600
there is a steady deterioration in Nasta‘ik which becomes larger and
coarser, whereas Naskhi gradually improves after this date.
The Turks of Kashghar adopted the Arabic alphabet on their con-
version to Islam and were using it for works, both sacred and profane,
by the eleventh century. Turkish conservatism made hardly any altera-
tion to the Arabic alphabet which was unsuitable for expressing the
numerous vowels of Turkish and was replaced by the Latin letters in
1928. The last years of the Arabic alphabet in Turkey were charac-
terised by an attempt to assign a vowel letter for every vowel but even
this proved to be inadequate. Add. 7851 (Case 11) is an example of the
Arabic character as used in Eastern Turkish in the fifteenth century.
The hand is a Nasta‘/ik, far from possessing any calligraphic merit, and
the work is the History of the Prophets, translated from the Persian by
Rabghiizi in 1310. The language represents an intermediate stage
between the Middle Turkish works of the eleventh century and
Chaghatay which had become the main literary language among the
20
Turks of Central Asia by the fifteenth century. This copy does not use
the special modified letter employed to express the v in words like sav
‘water’ which is found in some old copies of Middle Turkish works as
well as in some archaic Persian manuscripts.
Most of the earlier manuscripts in Western (or Anatolian) Turkish
which later developed into Ottoman Turkish are written in Naskhi.
The only change made in the Arabic-Persian script by the Western
Turks was the adaptation of the letter & to express a nasal #. This letter
was sometimes distinguished by three dots. In the early example
exhibited in Case 11, the vowels are indicated with the Arabic vowel-
signs. In the fifteenth century the use of the vowel-signs began to
decline but the Arabic letters of prolongation came to be used as vowel-
letters right up to 1928. Or. 4126 is the only known copy of the Divan of
Kadi Burhan el-Din, copied in 798/1396, two years before his death and
bearing some corrections almost certainly in his own hand. The somewhat
elongated letters appear in other early Anatolian manuscripts, notably
one containing the works of the early fifteenth-century poet Ahmedi Dai.
Sometimes the Nas&hi contains numerous flourishes and is known as
Icazet or Tevki’. This is usually found only in ornamental headings.
The Divani script, with its more elaborate form Ce//, used for headings
and title-pages, was used almost exclusively for official documents in
Turkey. Add. 22135 (on the screen), a berd¢ or exequatur granted at the
request of the English Ambassador at the Porte to Samuel Bury, Consul
in Cyprus, is dated 1088/1677. This is a fine example of an elegant Divani
hand and the document beats the Tughrdé or monogtam of Sultan
Mehemmed IV. Or. 11559 (mounted on the screen) is one of a collec-
tion of four documents for the protection of the 4th Earl of Caernarvon,
a Mr Burgess and Viscount Sandon on their travels through Turkey.
The earliest is dated 1250/1834—5 and the latest, 1269/185 2-3. Karma was
the name formerly applied to all kinds of cursive Turkish hands. It was
the Turkish equivalent of Shikasteh. When a hand is a small and cursive
variety of Nasta‘lik or Divani, the writing is called Ta‘lik-kirmast ot
Diani-kirmast. Harl. 1815, part of the selected letters of ‘Ali Celebi
Kinalizade, is a good example of seventeenth-century Divani-kirmasi.
A variety of cursive script evolved by the Turks was the Rik‘a. This
became the ordinary handwriting not only for Turks but also for Arabs.
Diacritical points are combined and all unnecessary strokes abbreviated
so that it can be written rapidly. Although it is of late date (1268/
1851-2), Or. 10897, a collection of historical works by Ahmed Resmi,
is a good example of Rik‘a copied by an educated person.
A peculiar type of writing without the diacritical points named
Siyakat was used in the Ottoman treasury accounts and documents.
744
 URDU, SINDHI, PUSHTU AND MALAY
(Case 6)
In addition to Persian and Turkish, the Arabic script was adapted for
many different languages, notably Urdu, Sindhi, Pushtu and Malay, but
none of these developed characteristic scripts of their own.
A tepresentative collection of manuscripts are in Case 6. The literary
development of languages of Central Asia and the Indian Sub-Continent
using the Arabic script was slow, as they were overshadowed by Persian
which had a cultural development of many centuries behind it. In
consequence there are very few early manuscripts in these languages.
The older of the two Urdu manuscripts on exhibition is a miscellany
dated 1153/1740-1 to 1158/1745-6. It is open at a rhymed vocabulary of
Persian words explained in Urdu, compiled in 990/15 82 (Add. 5629). The
language of the Romance of Ratan Sen and Padmavati (Add. 16880), com-
posed by a poet named Hans, is a form of Deccani Urdu closer to Hindi.
The manuscript was copied towards the close of the eighteenth century.
Or. 6533 is a collection of five poems in Sindhi, mostly religious in
character. It belongs to the first half of the eighteenth century. The
eatliest known Pushtu manuscript, now at Tiibingen, was copied in
1061/1651. Two manuscripts of early date in this language ate in the
British Museum. One of these (Or. 4228), copied in 1101 /1690, contains
the poetical works of Mirza Khan Ansari.
A letter in Malay (Harl. Ch. 43.A.6) is attached to the screen.It is
from the Raja Bendhahara Paduka of Birni to the ‘English Captain’ at
Jambi. Both these places are in Sumatra. The date of this letter cannot
be fixed with any accuracy but it is likely to have been written in the
seventeenth century. The other document in Malay on exhibition
is a
proclamation by Sit Thomas Raffles (Or. 9484). It is dated Septemb
er
2th, 1811. Like Turkish and Bahasa Indonesia, Malay is now
written
in the Latin alphabet.

5. SOUTH SEMITIC SCRIPTS

ETHIOPIC
(Case I)
The origin of the South Semitic alphabet has already been
referred to.
This is the script of the inscriptions in Ancient South
Arabian, the
language of the ancient South-west Arabian city-states which
flourished
from about the eighth century B.c. to the sixth century
A.D. The script
spread to Ethiopia and the oldest Ethiopic (Ge‘ex)
inscriptions date
ae
back to the first few centuries A.p. Of great importance are the fourth-
century inscriptions of the Ethiopian Empire of Axum whose coins
also illustrate the script over several centuries.
It has been mentioned that the Semitic alphabets only indicated
consonants. In Hebrew, Arabic and Syriac, systems were devised for
indicating vowels by additional points above or below the letters. In
Ethiopic a different solution was found. The vowels wete indicated by
altering slightly the form of the preceding consonant. Thus a sylla-
bary was formed, and since there were seven vowels indicated for each
of the twenty-six consonants, Ge‘ex had a total of 182 syllabic signs. This
development is already discernible in some of the Axumite inscriptions
and by the time of the earliest extant manuscripts it was a feature of
almost a millennium’s standing, for very few Ethiopic manuscripts
earlier than the fifteenth century have been preserved. We exhibit a very
fine manuscript of the Octateuch (the first eight books of the Bible) dated
to the fifteenth century (Or. 480) as an example of the older style of calli-
graphy. It will be seen that in comparison with the later examples this
early form of script is rather spidery, yet it has an elegance that the later
form seems to lack. The golden age of fine Ethiopic manuscripts was
the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and our example
(Or. 590) is a richly illustrated hymn-book of the eighteenth century.
Ambharic is the principal modern language of Ethiopia. It is written
in the old Ethiopic script with certain modifications to indicate the
additional ejective consonants of Amharic. The manuscript showing the
modern development of the script is a medico-magical text in Ethiopic
and Amharic (Or. 11390) extensively decorated with magical drawings.
This script is in current use for writing and printing most of the
languages of Ethiopia.

23
 III. SCRIPTS ADAPTED FROM
THE GREEK ALPHABET

1 COPTIC
(Case 12)
The Coptic alphabet consists of the twenty-four letters of the Greek
alphabet supplemented with six or seven additional characters, ac-
cording to dialect, derived from demotic, the cursive and rapid form
of writing employing ancient Egyptian principles, which was in the
Ptolemaic and Roman periods the ordinary writing of daily life. The
word Coptic is also used to describe the language of the sctipt: it is
the lineal descendant of the ancient Egyptian tongue and is still spoken
in the liturgy of the Coptic rites. This is the only stage of the Egyptian
language in which speech sounds ate satisfactorily represented by a
purely alphabetic writing of both vowels and consonants.
Attempts to adapt the Greek alphabet for the writing of the Egyptian
language wete made in the first three centuries of our eta, in school
exercises where demotic lists of names and the like were given phonetic
transcriptions in Greek letters, and in horoscopes and othet magical
texts which required for their efficacy the correct pronunciation of the
names of demons and of the magical words of power. Coptic was not,
however, used for regular literary compositions until the early fourth
century when Christian, Manichaean, and Gnostic missionaries were
active among the Egyptian-speaking element of the population, for
whose use translations of the sacred books were made. Within another
century, under Christian influence, the difficulties which atose in
borrowing the alphabet of a foreign language were resolved and the
conventions of the use of individual letters and diacritical marks
standardised.
Of the Greek letters, gamma, delta, and xeta ate rarely used in Coptic
except in the writing of loan-words. The double letters ¢hesz, xt, phi,
and psi ate used in the Sahidic dialect normally only to replace certain
combinations of consonants but in the Bohaitic dialect, which
retains
strongly aspirate forms, they are common. Faiyyumic is the
only
dialect to use dambda regularly in place of rho. Sahidic makes no
distinc-
tion between the sounds which ate transliterated in ancient Egyptian 4,
A, b, h: it uses in all cases the ‘h? sign sori. In Achmimic the two
groups
are distinguished: / and / are represented by hori, b and b by
a barred
24
hori. In Bohairic the second pair is written with the chai, a character
peculiar to that dialect. The letters are also used to write the numerals:
for 6 the Gréek digamma is employed, for 90 the Coptic character fai
and for 900 a barred form of rho.
At the time of the appearance of Coptic as a literary language,
papyrus was still in common use. The roll persisted to the fifth century
for certain types of text and the Middle Egyptian text of the Didache
(Or. 9271) is a notable example. In general the codex was standard and
the Coptic script of this period is usually simple and unaffected, imi-
tating contemporary Greek hands and practices, for instance in the use of
contractions for xomina sacra and of a supralinear stroke at the end of aline
to denote the letter mv. The page is rarely adorned. Coptic calligraphy,
however, shows at its best on the vellum codices which rapidly came into
general use from the fourth century. The smooth pumiced surface of the
skin was prepared for writing by ruled guide lines scored across the page
from which the letters were hung withneat regularity. The characters were
cleanly and clearly delineated in black ink with a split reed pen which
allowed contrast between the thick vertical and thin horizontal strokes.
There was no undue exaggeration of forms, no exuberant flourishes.
The two hands of the Gnostic Péstis Sophia (Add. 5114) and the con-
temporary hand of the Achmimic biblical fragment (Or. 5299 i) are
excellent examples of the fine penmanship and attractive layout of the
early vellum codices of the fourth and fifth centuries A.p.
For literary works uncials were invariably employed. The semi-
cursive ligatured hand of the Apocalypse of Elias which was chosen to
fill some blank leaves at the end of an early fourth-centuty codex of
Deuteronomy, Jonah and Acts (Ot. 7594) is exceptional. In the fine
Sahidic manuscripts of the ninth and tenth centuries a sloping uncial
was used for the scribal colophon (Or. 6784); similar half uncials could
be used for legal texts (Or. 9525 i, which is of interest for the individual
signatures of the assenting parties to the agreement).
The characteristic development of the Coptic literary hand is an
enlargement of the size of the individual letters and of the format of the
page, and an exaggeration of certain letters, notably the Greek phi and
the special Coptic characters, quite out of proportion to the rest of
the alphabet. After the introduction of paper in the thirteenth century
there was a tendency to greater ornamentation of the letters and of the
page. The fine codex of the four gospels in Bohairic, written in the
second half of the seventeenth century, admirably illustrates these
characteristics (Or. 1316).
The Coptic alphabet was borrowed by the Nubian church for the
writing of liturgical books in the vernacular. Not all the Coptic letters
25
occur except in loan-words and it was necessary to add a few symbols
to teptesent sounds peculiar to Nubian. The few Nubian texts which
have survived date from the ninth to the eleventh centuries and the script
exhibits a pronounced inclination to the right. The example exhibited
here (Or. 6805) comes from the monastic library of St Michael’s near
Esna in Upper Egypt and is perhaps the most complete Old Nubian
codex to have survived.

2, ARMENIAN AND GEORGIAN

(Case 12)

Between the yeats A.D. 390 and 400, St Mestob, in collaboration with
the Catholicos, St Sahak, anda Greek named Rufanos, created a system
of writing for Armenian. It consists of thirty-eight letters and was
derived from the Greek alphabet. Some letters, however, were adapted
from the Aramaic, or perhaps from the Pahlavi script, to express sounds
which were peculiar to Armenian. The characters bear only a very slight
resemblance to the Greek, but the influence of the latter is to be seen in
the existence of vowels and capitals.
In Armenian manuscripts three varieties of hand were used—the
Erkat’agir (ancial), the Bo/orgir (round hand) and the Né¢rgir (notary’s
hand). Or. 81, a biblical manuscript which contains the Gospels, is a
good example of an Erka?’agir hand, written about a.p. 1181, while the
Bolorgir is teptesented by a copy of the Epistles, dating from the
thirteenth century (Add. 19730). Manuscripts in the Né¢rgir hand are
mainly from the last two centuries. The example on exhibition (Or.
5459) is a geographical and historical miscellany, copied in A.D. 1616.
The connection between the Georgian and Armenian alphabets
remains obscure, although tradition ascribes the Georgian writing to
St Mestob. Two alphabets are found in Georgian. The M&hedruli (lay
hand), of thirty-three letters, is the type of writing used in the Georgian
SSR at the present day. The Musha, a monthly journal of the Georgian
Socialist Revolutionary Party, dated 1889-91, shows a M&hedru/i hand
(Or. 5315). The old Khutsuri or ecclesiastical script (thirty-eight letters)
is illustrated in this exhibition by a book of prayers, dated a.p. 1621
(Sloane 1338). It differs from the M&hedru/i in possessing capital letters.
The alphabet of the Caucasian Albanians (Atwank’) was a close
relation of the Armenian. No original manuscripts in this character
have survived but a table giving the letters of the alphabet was
discovered in an Armenian manuscript of the fifteenth century; and
some further examples have appeared in a copy made from this manu-
script between 1580 and 1621 which is now in the Kurdian Collection.
26
 Perr EaLNDIAN SGRIP-LS

1. NORTH INDIAN
(Cases 24-6)
Writing existed in India as long ago as the time of the Indus Valley
Civilisation (2500-1500 B.c.). The script then was a form of picture
writing which remains undeciphered to the present day. With the dis-
appearance of this civilisation all knowledge of writing probably
vanished for many centuries. Its reappearance occurs in the Maurya
period of Indian history (third century B.c.) when a series of royal
inscriptions, the edicts of Asoka, present us with two entirely new
scripts. One, generally known as Brahmi and written from left to right,
is the ancestor of all modern Indian scripts and of many others; the
second, Kharosthi, written from right to left, had a much shorter life,
confined to North-west India and Central Asia, before disappearing
without any descendants. Despite attempts to link Brahmi with the
Indus script, the more plausible and majority view assumes that a
Semitic alphabet—precisely which is uncertain—was imported into
India to become the Brahmi we first meet in the inscriptions. This must
have happened some time before the third century B.c. to allow for the
remarkable adaptation of the alphabet to Indian needs.
Brahmi is, in the strictest sense of the word, not an alphabet, since
each basic consonant must automatically be read as consonant +4. This
syllabic device can be explained by the fact that 2 was by far the most
frequent sound in the early North Indian languages called Indo-Aryan
(of which Sanskrit is the best known). The much smaller number of
vowels other than a were shown by attaching signs before, after, below
ot above the consonant to be modified. The languages of course
required and the script possessed independent vowel signs or letters for
the beginnings of words. Further, where two ot mote consonants were
pronounced together the omission of ¢ could be shown by placing one
character above the other. The modern Indian scripts (if we exclude
the foreign Perso-Arabic for Urdu and some languages of the North-
west) still in the main use this system, even though the languages of the
south belong to an entirely different family. Moreover, during the
period of Indian cultural expansion into South-east and Central Asia
during the first millennium .p., scripts derived from Brahmi were
catried by traders, colonists and monks and eventually adapted to
27
Tibeto-Burman, Mon-Khmer and Malayo-Polynesian languages, for
which they are still used.
Early Brahmi was telatively homogeneous throughout India and,
from the middle of the third century B.c., a continuous history of
writing, unfortunately provisional in many respects, can be traced. For
some centuries the forms of eatly Brahmi developed slowly in the
incteasing number of inscriptions, seals and coins on which they occur.
No manuscripts survive from the earliest period and only a small
number ate older than the present millennium. These, on palm-leaf and
bitch-bark chiefly, come from regions climatically favourable to their
preservation, such as Kashmir and Nepal, the dry desert sites in Chinese
Turkestan and even Japan.
In the period of political unity in India that occurred under the Gupta
dynasty in the fourth century A.D., considerable development in the
scripts becomes apparent. The Northern scripts of the present day can
all be referred to forms that grew out of types to which the name Gupia
may conveniently be given.
Moteover, the export of manuscripts to the Buddhist centres of
Chinese Turkestan resulted in the establishment of Gup/a writing in
Central Asia. Discoveries of manuscripts in the area reveal that varieties
of this script were developed there to serve not only Sanskrit (Or.
118788) but also Iranian and Tocharian dialects. Descendants of Gupia
wtiting continued to be used in Central Asia until the tenth century.
Another Indian export into that region was Kharosthi (N. Xv. 350), the
one Indian script not directly derived from Brahmi. As we have seen,
its first appearance was contemporary with Brahmi. Its origin, however,
was no doubt an Aramaic script introduced under Persian rule in the
North-west, where Brahmi must have influenced its adaptation to
Indian needs. Kharosthi never spread far into India from its home in the
North-west and eventually it died out both there (fifth century) and in
Central Asia (seventh century).
The inscriptions of the Gup/a period in India itself owe their diversity
in part to innovation and in part to the influence of local and older
traditions. It is difficult to assign hard and fast limits to regional styles
of writing and overlapping constantly took place. From the end of the
sixth century the immediate predecessors of the modern scripts begin
to emerge. A script that flourished throughout North India from this
time until about the tenth century, and even longer in the Far East, is
vatiously called Kujfila, ‘acute-angled’ or Siddhamatrka. In China and
Japan it was called Siddbam (Or. 8212 (195)). One feature of this script
is a pronounced wedge seen at the tops of the letters. This head-mark,
which is not new to Kufi/a, is one of the many devices observable in the
28
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ASOKAN and EARLY BRAHMI ASIAN SCRIPTS

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history of Indian writing to attain a general regularity in the shape of the
letters and in the appearance of the inscription or page. In this tendency
Kutila prepates us for the rise of Nadgari from about the seventh century
onwards.
In this script the head-mark, instead of being a wedge, becomes a
straight line over the entire width of the letter. The effect of this
lengthening is to make the writing appear to hang from a continuous
line. Another feature of developed Nagari is the presence of a sttaight
vertical stroke to the right of the letter, joined to the horizontal top-
line at right angles. These two features occur in a good many of the
letters, though not in all; and they are also apparent in other scripts.
Nagari, originally a western script, has gradually come to displace
regional alphabets for the use of Sanskrit, especially in the last two
centuries. But in Central and Western India various forms of it have
been widely used in inscriptions and literary documents over the last
thousand years. Today Hindi and many of its neighbours (Marathi,
Bihari and Nepali for instance) use its latest stage under the name of
Devanagari (Add. 15414).
In the North-west Kashmiri still uses a script that goes back directly
to a western form of Gupfa writing. With antecedents in the manuscript
finds at Gilgit (seventh century), the Sarada@ of Kashmir (Or. 6758) is
found from the ninth century onwards and has changed little up to the
present time. The North-west possesses a number of other, related,
scripts. For Sindhi and Panjabi dialects numerous varieties of the
Landa script are used. Tradition has it that Lazdd was adapted in the
sixteenth century to write the sacred hymns of the Sikhs. This adapta-
tion is called Gurmukhi and is now also used for. secular Panjabi
(Or. 12093). Another popular cursive script of the area is [@k&ri,
employed for the mixed dialects northward of the Panjab and for which
a polished form called Dogri also exists. The use of Ndgari in Kashmir
is recent and may be recognised by the extremely thick strokes of the
letters.
In the North-east of India the present scripts (Bengali, Assamese,
Maithili and Oriya) may all be referred to developments of the proto-
Bengali (lately termed Gaudi or Gaudiya). In origin this group derives
from an eastern variety of the Kuti/a type which appears in the seventh
century but subsequently undergoes considerable Ndgari influence.
A special position is occupied by Nepal. The northward retreat of
Buddhism into the highlands, where the Mahommedan invasions did
not penetrate, is marked by a quantity of manuscript remains and the
scripts found in them may briefly be mentioned here.
While the oldest manuscripts preserved in Nepal ate in Kuji/a, the
ao
appearance of the thick, flat-topped script (Or. 6902), deriving from the
Buddhist centres of the Pala kingdom of Bengal and Bihar, dates from
the tenth century, a petiod when Ndgari was prevalent in Eastern
India. This script, sometimes called Ancient Northern Character, was
maintained in Nepal in ornamental forms for some centuries and one of
its variants (Rafa) is also found in Tibet. Another script used in Nepal
during the Middle Ages is a hooked type (Vartula ot Bhatijin Mola)
which recalls the Oriya character and certainly has Bengali affinities.
By the seventeenth century the prevailing script was a flat-topped one
called Newari or Nepali character. The Gurkha conquest in the
eighteenth century resulted in a spreading use of Nagar7 and the current
Indian type is now the official script of the Nepalese kingdom. The
Nepalese scripts were also employed for a Tibeto-Burman language of
the area, the Newari; this now also uses the Indian Devanagari.
The presence of Nagar7 in Eastern India for a time obscured the
development of the Bengali script. A proto-Bengali script is, however,
found in the tenth and eleventh centuries. From this time the develop-
ment of Bengali writing continues until it becomes fixed in the
seventeenth century (Or. 5595). Modern Bengali to some extent shares
the Nagari characteristics of a flat top-line and a straight right vertical.
Their distribution, however, varies in the two scripts. The script of
Mithila, a neighbouring territory to the west, where a dialect of Bihari
(Maithili) is spoken, is closely related. It is now used only by the local
Brahmans. The Assamese language, spoken to the east of Bengal, is
written in a script almost identical with the Bengali, but Manipuri, a
Tibeto-Burman language of the North-east, uses a startlingly different
form (Or. 7563).
The script of Orissa (Oriya) is held to derive from an early form of
Bengali, although the influence of Nagari also went into its formation.
At the present time two forms of this script are found: the Brahmani,
which was used for manuscripts and became the basis of the printed
character (14121.¢.15); and the Karayi, a cursive variant. The Oriya
script (Brahmani) is easily recognised by the marked curvature of the
letter-tops, which sometimes dwarfs the significant element of the
character. The present form of the Oriya script starts in the fifteenth
century and is thought to have been influenced by the neighbouring
Telugu writing.
Tradition places the beginning of the Tibetan script in A.D. 632.
According to this tradition the script was adapted from an Indian
otiginal. No doubt this original was a contemporary form of northern
writing, related to the Kuji/a. As Tibetan belongs to a group of lan-
guages entirely unlike the Indian and possesses some quite different
30
sounds, the original script had to be adapted to its special needs. The
present form of printed Tibetan is strikingly similar to the earliest
examples of the script. Two main types ate distinguished: the one, used
in block printing as well as modern founts, has a head-mark somewhat
like the Nagari and is called ‘head-possessing’; the other, a cursive
form, omits the head-mark and is called ‘headless’. This cursive type
has some three or four varieties.
In the west of India a script related to Devandgari, but retaining
various atchaic features, is associated with the Jains (Or. 5149). An
ancient religious community with a strong literary tradition in Sanskrit,
Prakrit and Gujarati, they have preserved manuscripts almost as old
as the Nepalese. The conservative styles of Jaina manuscripts—
striking also for their tradition of illumination—were maintained until
modern times. In the Deccan, another form of Ndgari, called Nandi-
nagari, has been used for over a thousand years.
The normal script used for Marathi is a Devanagari, called Balbodh,
which scarcely differs from the type based on the manuscript traditions
of Benares in the east. There also exists a cursive hand called Modz
(Or. 6391), in which the use of the horizontal top-line has, if anything,
been extended. This script has also been used in lithographed texts.
Its origin was supposed to be an adaptation of Devanagari, which took
place in the late seventeenth century, to achieve greater speed in
writing. This view must now be revised since older manuscripts in
Modi are known.
Another cursive script, called Kaithi and no doubt of the same origin
as Devanagari, is found in use throughout Northern India from Bihar
in the east to Gujarat in the west. In Gujarat a form of this script
displaced Ndagari in the nineteenth century as the literary and printed
character for the Gujarati language (14145.e.1). In Bihar another form
has also been printed for the local speech (14121.aa.4). Kazthi is found
in manuscripts of Hindi literary texts, but is predominantly a clerical
scriptused for practical ends. A characteristic of this script is the absence
of the horizontal top-line; nevertheless we find that Kaithi is often
written beneath a continuous line drawn right across the page.

2. SOUTH INDIAN
(Cases 20-21)
South India is particularly rich in palaeographical material. Cave and
temple walls, pillars, seals, coins and royal grants inscribed on impertish-
able metal plates tell the illustrious story of her ancient dynasties. Yet
when it comes to tracing the historical development of the scripts now
31
used in this particular part of the peninsula the picture is often made
more obscute by the very wealth of material. There is evidence that the
prototypes of the modern scripts developed around A.D. 350 and that
they in turn can be traced back to a southern type of the Asokan
Brahmi which in itself was probably only a regional variation of the
inscriptions drawn up by the Imperial secretariat at Pataliputra.
After the fourth century the southern scripts split up into a number
of different groups, some of them almost identical, some already
showing considerable individuality. Some were short-lived blind alleys
in a long and intricate process of evolution, but all of them showed
marked signs of their northern ancestry.
There was the so-called Western Variety used in the Konkan, in parts
of Gujarat, Maharastra and Hyderabad which, in the ninth century, was
suddenly replaced by the introduction of the Ndgari alphabet. The
Central Indian script in the north of Hyderabad, the Central Provinces
and to the south of Bombay, had a similar span of life; at first closely
related to the above-mentioned script it developed later into the so-
called ‘box-headed script’, an attractive and highly individualistic form
of writing. Between the seventh and the twelfth century the Later
Kalifga inscriptions on the north-east coast of the present Andhra
Pradesh already mirror the awakening of a new literary spirit in the
Dravidian country. Somewhere during this period a turning point
seems to have been reached and, though this script was at the beginning
strongly intermixed with northern letters, as time went by it began to
botrow mote and mote from the Grantha, Telugu and Kannada scripts.
From many points of view the Telugu-Kannada script—almost
identical at present—is the most important of all South Indian scripts.
After a tather tentative start at the outset of the first Christian millen-
nium it made a more definite appearance in the inscriptions of the
Kadambas during the fifth century a.p. From then on it developed
steadily through a variety of different stages (Ind. Chart. 11) to the
script now used in Mysore and Andhra.
The modern scripts prevalent in the extreme south of the Indian sub-
continent are all based, in one way or the other, on the Grantha script.
In the ninth century it was replaced in Mysore and Coorg by Telugu-
Kannada characters whereas the Pallava Grantha of Tondainddu—the
neighbourhood of Madtas—began to move slowly but steadily in the
direction of the modern Grantha, Tamil and Malayalam scripts.
The development of the early stages of modern Grantha (Or. 11731)
is still obscure. As its very name suggests, Grantha was, and still is,
a literary sctipt. It was employed in inscriptions, and was the script
which learned Brahmins in South India used to write Sanskrit on palm
32
leaves, a highly perishable medium, sutviving examples of which
cannot be dated prior to the sixteenth century. By the ninth century a
simplified form of the old Grantha seems to have reached Kerala and
the modern Malayalam script has its roots firmly in this.
A different situation arose in the south of the Tamil country, where
there was a well-developed script, Vafferuttu or round letters (Ind.
Chart. 4) used in most parts of the old Pandya kingdom. This was a
script of great simplicity specially suited to the distinctive phonetic
system of the Tamil language as laid down by its ancient grammatians.
It possessed no signs for aspirates and spirants, no ja and only one
sibilant which lies between the two different kinds of sha, and sa and,
when doubled, becomes a distinct plosive, cha. Since voiced and un-
voiced consonants are mutually convertible there was no need to
express them by separate signs.
Up to the eighth century both scripts seem to have existed side by
side (Ind. Chart. 28) but under the Cholas, in the eleventh century, this
old script was gradually supplanted by a Brahmanical adaptation of the
Tamil-Grantha to the basic rules governing V/afteruttu. This means
that whereas the Malayalam and the Telugu-Kannada scripts ate
modelled on the full scale of the Sanskrit alphabet, written Tamil is still
of an austere simplicity allowing, for example, only one and the same
character to express sounds like ka, kha, ga and gha.
When, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a number of
European missionaries began to devote themselves seriously to a study
of the Tamil language they were, amongst other things, greatly
hampered by the habit of native writers of making no division between
words, lines and stanzas (Or. 11989). The Jesuit Father Beschi (Add.
26110) began to initiate a reform and invented the ‘puJJi’?, the dot
above the consonant to indicate the absence of the inherent short a.
This was taken over by native writers and eventually their manuscripts
became not only more legible for the students of modern Tamil but,
by introducing a division between the stanzas, their verses came to be
set out like poems in the western manner (Or. 2728).
By the fifteenth century Vasteruttu was practically extinct in the Tamil
country. In Kerala, the ancient coastline of Malabar, it remained alive
for two mote centuries; then a modified form called Ké/eruttu was
employed by Hindu sovereigns to draw up their grants. The Mappilas,
descendants of early Arab settlers living in the neighbourhood of
Telicherry and the Islands off the coast, used this script until very
recently when it was replaced by a modified Arabic alphabet.
It can thus be said that all modern South Indian scripts are based on
a variation of the Brahmi script used in the south of the ASokan Empite
3 33 BMA
during the third century 3.c., with the addition of certain characters
used to represent sounds not found in the general ‘Indian’ syllabary,
such as the reflex lateral ra.
SINHALESE

The origin of the script and language of Ceylon must be separately

sought outside the island. The Sinhalese language was brought by
immigrants speaking the Indo-Aryan dialect of their homeland in
India. The first appearance of writing on the island takes the form of
Brahmi inscriptions not much later than the earliest Brahmi on the
Indian mainland. Its subsequent history falls into two broad stages. The
first, covering the period from the third century B.c. to the seventh
A.p., is marked by developments in the Sinhalese language that led to
the loss of certain letters. The second period, from the seventh century
onwards, began by reversing this process. Buddhist influences from the
north led to a wide adoption of Sanskrit and this required a fuller script
than was available. The need was met by borrowing from the Pallava
Grantha script of South India and in addition a number of existing
letters wete modified under the same influence. The remaining characters
can show a direct line of descent from the earliest Sinhalese Brahmi.
The rich cultural activity that marked the eleventh to thirteenth
centuries in Ceylon ensured the development of the reformed alphabet.
Sanskrit was sedulously cultivated and the impact of this language
continues to the present day. The form of script in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries presents little difficulty to the modern reader of
Sinhalese.

34
 V. SCRIPTS OF SOUTH-EAST ASIA

1. MAINLAND SOUTH-EAST ASIA

(Case 23)
At first sight the various systems of writing used in the countries wenow
know as Burma, Thailand (Siam), Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam look
very different from one another. These scripts have much in common,
however, and when we trace them back to their early forms in manu-
scripts and rock inscriptions we find that they were all derived from a
common Indian source.
During the first millennium a.p. there was already a considerable
traffic between the coasts of South India and both the mainland of
South-east Asia and the Malay archipelago. Traders, colonists and
military adventurers travelled along this route, bringing with them a
cultural and spiritual tradition which slowly became assimilated and
acclimatised on new soil. By the sixth century A.D. new kingdoms under
Hindu rulers had arisen in several parts of South-east Asia, and Hindu
colonists were spreading a knowledge of Sanskrit and a form of writing
based on the early Grantha script of South India.
The other great cultural force at work in South-east Asia was the
Buddhist religion, which may have been introduced from India before
the time of Christ and which continued to spread throughout the first
millennium .p. Its impact was reinforced by the importation of Pali
scriptures from Ceylon in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Together,
the culture and civilisation of India and the Buddhist religion played
an immense role in implanting a common cultural tradition among the
peoples of South-east Asia.
The writing system imported from India which helped to diffuse this
tradition gave rise to what was virtually a common South-east Asian
sctipt in about the sixth century 4.D. It sptead outwards from the
Mekong and Menam basins and southwards into the Malay peninsula.
From it, in the course of time, evolved the Mon, Burmese, Cambodian,
Thai and Laotian scripts, each of them adapting and adding to the script
to make it capable of reproducing the sounds of the language concerned.
Manuscripts written in the scripts of South-east Asia take a variety of
different forms. Many ate written on palm-leaf, the traditional writing
material of South and South-east Asia. The leaves ate usually those of
the talipot palm, Corypha umbraculifera, sometimes of the palmyra,
35 ac
Borassus flabellifer, which is shorter and sometimes wider than the
former. Burmese and Thai medical and astrological works, and horo-
scopes, ate often written on palmyra. The bundle of inscribed leaves is
held together by cords through the centre and protected by carved
wooden boards at top and bottom.
Besides palm-leaves, folding books (parabaik) of thick white or black
paper were found throughout the area. Paper was probably introduced
from China at an early date, and the typical South-east Asian paper
manuscript consisting of one continuous sheet folded accordion-styleis no
doubt derived from the Chinese folding book of similar shape that was
common from the Sung period onwards. Brightly painted folding books,
mote elongated than the Chinese prototype, occur in Burma, Thailand
and Cambodia. Other folding books from Burma and Thailand consist of
blackened paper written in white characters with a steatite pencil, a
less laborious business than writing with a metal stylus on palm-leaf.
The major written languages of South-east Asia will now be con-
sidered separately, to see how the original South Indian scripts under-
went different developments in various parts of the region.

MON (TALAING OR PEGUAN)

During the first millennium a.p., varieties of the South Indian script
related to the early Grantha alphabet began to spread eastwards among
the countries of South-east Asia. One variety adopted by the Khmer
people developed into the modern scripts of Cambodia and Thailand.
Another, taken over by the Mon people of South Burma, Martaban and
Tenassetim, was used to write the Mon or Peguan language and later
adapted for Burmese and other languages of that area. The earliest
Mon inscriptions, however, ate those found at Nakhorn Pathom in
southern Thailand. We can no longer trace all the intermediate stages
through which this script developed into the form of writing found in
eleventh-century Burma, although the relationship is clear enough.
In appearance, the Mon script differs from that developed by the
Khmerts. Its letters are more rounded, composed of circles or segments
of circles, and having a monumental appearance. In the course of time,
as Mon began to be used more and more for writing inscriptions, this
tendency to roundness became more pronounced and the forms of
different letters became less easily distinguishable from one another. The
Mon script closely follows the model of the Sanskrit alphabet and has
found it necessary, like other languages of this area, to modify the
system of notation for its own sounds to accord with the pattern of a
foreign speech, adding certain marks and symbols to represent sounds
not found in Sanskrit.
36
 BURMESE
*

The Mon peoples of Southern Burma were overrun in the eleventh

century by the Burmese from Pagan, who proceeded to assimilate their
culture and adopt their script. Mon and Burmese inscriptions of this
period are written in characters which are practically identical and
obviously derived from the same source. This Mon-Burmese culture,
essentially Buddhist in character, was reinforced in the succeeding
centuries by Pali Buddhism imported from Ceylon. In its early stages
the Burmese script exhibits two main forms: a rounded script found on
stone inscriptions, possibly derived from stylus-writing, and a more
angular cursive form seen on votive tablets and fresco inscriptions,
possibly related to pen and pencil writing. A later development was the
decorative ‘square Pali’ script found on Buddhist manuscripts used for
votive purposes. An example of the latter, a Kammavacd written in
large glossy lacquered characters, is exhibited. It is a handsome script,
but not easily legible. Kammavacd manuscripts are of various types, all
of them based on the palm-leaf in shape. Those from the north may be
of lacquer on a silk core, or on brass if the donor was a poor man;
those from the south may be written in gold letters on ivory (see
Or. 3446) or, for poor donors, on lacquered palm-leaf.
From the lapidary script gradually developed the rounded characters
which make up the Burmese written language of the present day, both
hand-written and printed. In adapting the script to their own use, the
Burmese added marks to indicate tonal differences. Like the Mon script
from which it was derived, the characters of modern Burmese are made
up almost entirely of circles, half-citcles, and segments of circles in
different combinations. It has been suggested that these characteristic
shapes may be due to the naturally rounded form of letters traced with a
stylus on palm-leaves.
CAMBODIAN
Among the scripts of South-east Asia derived from an Indian alphabet,
Cambodian or Khmer is one of the best documented from early times.
It is found in its earliest form in inscriptions dating from the fifth to the
ninth centuries, which bear a close resemblance to the ancient scripts of
South India. From the ninth to fourteenth centuries the script began to
take on individual Cambodian characteristics and during this time it was
used as the vehicle of writing of the brilliant Khmer civilisation, which
had its capital at Angkor. After the fourteenth century the Cambodian
script developed along two distinct lines, one branch serving for the
sacred texts of Buddhism, generally written in the Pali language, and
37
the other, a more cursive form, used chiefly for secular works written in
the native Cambodian language. The former is known as md, the latter
as chrieng; examples of both are shown in this exhibition.
Because of the difference in structure between the indigenous language
and the script used to write it, the Cambodians found it necessary to
adopt certain phonetic conventions in representing the sounds of their
own language, and to add many vowel signs and diacritical marks which
were not needed for the notation of Sanskrit. In this way it was possible
to introduce into the traditional alphabet new elements necessitated by
the development of the Cambodian language, but without making any
fundamental change in the system of writing, which remained basically
Indian. Many Cambodian manuscripts are written in the Pali language
but in Cambodian characters. The same script has been used to transcribe
other languages such as Thai. (See the manuscript Add. 15347 exhibited
in Case 23.)
THAI (SIAMESE)
The modern written language of Thailand grew out of the Cambodian
ot Khmer script and is therefore yet another of the numerous family of
sctipts descended from an Indian source. In its northern forms it was
probably also influenced in some respects by the thirteenth century
Mon script of Lamphun. (A virtually continuous gradation from Thai
to Burmese forms of letters can be seen if one compares a series of
scripts ranging from northern Thailand through the Shan states.)
Written Thai employs the full range of consonants found in the
Sanskrit alphabet, following the same alphabetical order, and is there-
fore capable of transcribing exactly the many words of Sanskrit origin
which have found their way into the Thai language. It has also added
consonants such as fand fp, the latter to replace the Indian p which had
come in via Cambodian as dD.
The forms of the letters have diverged considerably from their
Cambodian prototypes. There ate indications that the modification of
Cambodian script which produced the modern Thai system of writing
was in fact deliberate and planned, and not the result of gradual evo-
lutionary development over a long period. One major innovation was
the introduction of accents clearly indicating the tone in which a
syllable was to be pronounced. Thai is written in horizontal lines from
left to right, like all scripts of Indian origin.

38
 LAO
,

The Lao people form a large and important group within the Tai race.
As might be expected, the Laotian and Thai scripts are closely related.
In comparison with Thai, however, the Laotian writing system is
simpler and more nearly phonetic in its representation of the spoken
language. But the popular language of Laos which employs this script
is still in a state of considerable flux, and there is a tendency on the
part of conservative scholars to favour an orthography which in part
reflects the historic forms of words rather than their present-day sounds.
For the most part, Lao manuscripts are written on palm-leaves, the
letters being incised with a metal stylus on both sides of the leaf.

VIETNAMESE

The principal language of modern Vietnam is a tone language, basically

monosyllabic in structure, which has been subject for the past two
millennia to cultural influence from China. Consequently the earliest
writing system used in ancient Annam, as also in Japan and Korea, was
Chinese, which continued to be the language of learning and culture
until comparatively modern times. For native literature of a more
popular kind, a new system of writing known as chu-nom was developed.
Basically, this was a method by which Chinese characters, or modifi-
cations and combinations of Chinese characters, could be used to
represent the spoken language of Annam. This language was at the
same time enriched by the introduction of many words of Chinese
origin into its vocabulary. The writing of the chu-nom sctipt, however,
was governed by no fixed rules or well-defined principles. Only the
context could decide whether a Chinese character was to be read
phonetically or ideographically, or which part of a synthetic character
should determine the sound and which the meaning. This made the
chu-nom sctipt exceedingly difficult to read and write, and it has now
been supplanted by a more nearly phonetic script in roman letters,
augmented by diacritical marks to indicate tones and to provide
additional vowel symbols. The roman script is now universally used in
Vietnam.

he
 2. ISLAND SOUTH-BAST ASIA
(Case 22)
From the beginning of the Christian era this area was associated with
India through trade, and in Java especially the influence of Hinduism
can be seen from an early period. Sanskrit inscriptions in Java go back
to the fifth century A.p., but the oldest dated inscription is that of
Changgal, a.p. 732. The script differs only slightly from the South
Indian Pallava Grantha alphabet and shows similarities with the
Cambodian script of the time.
From the ninth century on, the Kav script, Mewine a clear relation-
ship to the script of the Changgal inscription, was in use and developed
into the modern Javanese script (Egerton 765; Add. 12301), which has
now been supplanted by the Roman alphabet.
According to ttadition the Javanese script was introduced by the
legendary king Haji Saka. It is used for the Javanese, Balinese (Or.
12971 (5)), Sundanese and Madurese languages, the Balinese script only
differing from the Javanese in having a rounder form. It is a syllabary
consisting of twenty a-bearing consonants with various signs to repre-
sent vowels other than a, and is written from left to right.
The Batak script of North Sumatra is not a native invention but
apparently derives from a simplified Indian script. It consists of
nineteen letters written from left to right on bark (Add. 19383) or
from top to bottom on bamboo. Closely related to the Batak script is
that of the South Sumatra Redjang-Lampong group of languages. It is
called ‘ Ka-ga-nga’. The Redjang syllabary has twenty-three characters,
whilst the Lampong has nineteen. Both are of South Indian origin and
ate written from left to right.
In South-west Celebes another alphabet of Indian origin developed,
the script of the Buginese and Macassarese languages. The Buginese
alphabet of twenty-three letters (see Add. 12347), and the Macassarese
alphabet of nineteen letters bear a close relationship to each other, the
Buginese having four additional letters to indicate a preceding nasal
consonant. However, the derivation of this script is not clear. All the
letters are pronounced with an a and the order of the alphabet is
almost that of a Sanskrit one, suggesting an Indian origin, but there is
no obvious relationship to the Devanagari script, though such an
ultimate derivation probably via South India is generally accepted.
Subsequent to the ancient Hindu influence on the Malaysian Archi-
pelago, the influence of Islam came via Gujarat in North-west India
during the fourteenth century. The important route between the west
40
and the Archipelago was through the straits of Malacca and so it
was North Sumatra and the Malayan Peninsula which were the first to
establish contact with Moslem merchants not only from India but also
from Arabia. They brought with them the Arabic script which thus
made its entrance to the whole area of the Archipelago and in which the
Malay language came to be written. Like Javanese, Malay is now usually
written in the Roman alphabet.

3. INVENTED SCRIPTS OF SOUTH-EAST ASIA

LOLO AND MOSO
(Case 23)
Two invented scripts used by non-Chinese peoples of China are Lolo
and Moso (also known as Na-khi). Both languages belong to the
Tibeto-Burman group and are spoken in Yiinnan, Szechwan and other
parts of South-west China, as well as in northern Vietnam and the
valley of the Mekong. The scripts they employ are of unusual interest,
having no apparent affinities with other written languages, nor indeed
with each other.
It has been affirmed that Lolo originated as an ideographic script, but
it is now agteed to be phonetic and syllabic. Over a thousand distinct
to
characters have been identified, though not all of them are common
the whole region; there are wide regional differences in both the spoken
or
and written language. Lolo may be written either horizontally
case.
vertically, the letters being tilted at an angle of 90° in the latter
of writing is the older of the two.
It is believed that the horizontal form
areas which have always
The vertical script is found chiefly in those
script is
been subject to Chinese domination whilst the horizontal
indepen-
confined to areas in which the Lolo have maintained their
early developm ent of written Lolo,
dence. Little is known of the
dated as early as 1533-4 have
though bilingual Lolo/Chinese inscriptions
been found.
h it appears to
The origins of the Moso script are also obscure, thoug
the few surviving
be an invention of no great antiquity. It is one of
on recogn isable drawings of
examples of a pictographic script, based
The great majority of
animals, birds, humans and everyday objects.
t of magica l texts,
Moso manuscripts written in this script consis
meant to be chanted
incantations and invocations to the gods, often
aloud by members of a priestly caste.
to be seen in Case 23
Examples of Lolo and Moso manuscripts are
(Or. 3662 and Or. 11417471 14264).
4I
VI. THE CHINESE SYSTEM OF WRITING

1. WRITING AND LANGUAGE

(Cases 16-18)
Chinese writing began with simple pictures. As in other pictographic
scripts, the various objects of everyday life form only part of the
language, being mainly nouns. For verbs, two signs can combine to
denote action, and in Chinese the sign for ‘hand’ was very common.
Abstract ideas like ‘above’ and ‘below’ were represented by a short
line above or below a longer line. For the sounds which these repre-
sented, compare basic English, or the nineteenth-century ‘Pidgin’,
where each syllable has an element of meaning. Even in ancient times,
the language had one strong vowel for each unit of meaning. Each
picture, or ideogram, thus represented one unit of meaning, and was
pronounced in one syllable. The next step was phonetic borrowing,
a reasonable transition, as related words were similar in sound, and the
ptinciple of using the ‘hand’, ‘tree’, ‘water? and other symbols in
combination was already established. It is very often the left-hand
element that stands for the idea suggested. Actions will have ‘hand’ at
the left, emotions will have ‘heart’, trees will have ‘tree’, while on the
right is a phonetic used for its similar sound.
These composite characters, determinative plus phonetic, soon
became the most common type. The ‘tree’, ‘hand’, and ‘water’ are
still easily recognisable, but because many of the old ‘phonetics’ were
approximate, each character is learnt afresh, without too much reliance
on the phonetic as a clue. In this way, the modern Chinese script has
become a vehicle for thought divorced from pictures.
A chatacteristic of ideographic scripts is the lack of attention paid
to variants in pronunciation, in place or in time. European scholars,
particularly Bernhard Karleren, have made valuable contributions
towards the reconstruction of the ancient pronunciation. (See Grammata
Serica Recensa in Case 18.) Medieval pronunciation is reflected in the
codification of poetical rhymes, still obligatory in traditional poetry,
though the modern sounds may not be phonetic rhymes.
From 1900 this dissociation of written and spoken language was
challenged. Peking speech forms entered the written language, and as
the number of two-syllabled words increased, the number of common
characters was drastically reduced. The dialect printing houses estab-
42
lished by European missionaries in the nineteenth century had Roman
and non-Roman founts for many regional variants (see Bible stories in
Shanghai dialect, Case 16), but today all publishing is in the literary
standard based on the speech of Peking. Chinese is fairly homogeneous
in the north and west, but in the south-east there are widely different
spoken languages. All have the same published literature.
To reinforce the authority of the Peking pronunciation, a Roman
alphabet is now taught to schoolchildren. Parallel with this, the
elimination of complex chatacters is achieved by using simpler semi-
cursive forms in all publications. This process is continuing, a remark-
able demonstration of the flexibility of an ancient script.

2. FORMS OF THE CHINESE SCRIPT

Divination inscriptions on bone of about 1000 B.c. ate some of the

earliest-known examples of Chinese script. Perishable materials for
writing during the next thousand years were bamboo, thin strips of
wood, and silk. For epigraphical evidence there are many bronze ritual
vessels, with a formal, and sometimes ornamental, script. From 100 B.c.
onwards extant inscriptions on wood and silk attest a highly developed
script, both standard and cursive, which has served Chinese culture and
government almost unchanged for two thousand yeats. This early
period is represented in the exhibition by two oracle bones, early
bronzes, a lacquer wine-cup from Korea, and garrison documents from
official
the Great Wall of China. The ‘clerical’ hand has been the
by the use of a long-haire d
standard from the Christian era, modified
brush and by the example of great calligraphers.
standard
Palaeographic development after the establishment of the
of the fourth
Ji-shu can best be seen in a series of Buddhist manuscripts
monasti c hand, acquire d overt
to tenth centuries. This is a formalised
by calli-
centuries by schools of scribes. In this limited field, dating
ned final stroke
graphy is alone possible. For instance, the broade
probably due to
clearly derives from the stiff style of the Han dynasty,
This formal style
the concentration of writing on thin slivers of wood.
later for metal
eventually became the standard for block-printing, and
type founts.
as in European
Cursive writing exists in all possible varieties. Where
e running hand
schools the manuscript hand is standardised, the Chines
in which the models are
can merge into ‘grass script’, a cursive hand _
taken from great calligraphers.
As an art form it is
Calligraphy came to be equated with education.
ugh the technique of
integrated with painting and block-printing. Thro
43
 ink-squeezes of stone inscriptions, the style of famous inscriptions has
been copied down through the centuries. A ‘rubbing’ of a Tang
dynasty inscription found in the Tunhuang caves is shown here. Calli-
graphy is still a real aesthetic element in the education of Chinese,
Japanese, and Koreans. Reproductions from recently published books
have been chosen to show the continuity of tradition.

3. KOREAN AND TANGUT

(Case I3)
Apart from the standard forms of Chinese, there are the deliberate
atchaisms of seal-script and the even mote fanciful adumbrations used
in magic charms and talismans. A whole system of fortune-telling
depends on the cabalistic analysis of strokes in the characters of a
petson’s name. Since this conscious use of writing could easily have
been adapted to phonetic notation of Chinese or foreign languages, it
is perhaps surprising that so few inventions have any vogue in East
Asia. The powerful influence of Chinese culture, especially in the Tang
dynasty, spread Chiriese writing and ideas so widely and deeply that
the neighbouring non-Chinese peoples rarely wrote their own languages.
In Korea, a few songs survive from the early period, written in Chinese
characters with conventional readings for grammatical endings. In
Vietnam, the native words could be represented by composite characters,
one part being the Chinese character for the meaning, and the other part
being a Chinese character indicating the sound.
Over the centuries the received pronunciation of Chinese borrowings
diverged in Japan, Korea, North China, South-east China, and Vietnam,
so that Koreans, for instance, needed their own way of representing
Chinese characters.
In 1446 King Sejong of Korea promulgated the first true phonetic
alphabet, based on linguistic principles. Most previous East Asian
scripts, including Sanskrit, were based on the syllable, but King Sejong
clearly distinguishes consonants and vowels. The letter & is a down-
watd hook, an ideographic representation of the obstruction of the
glottis by the tongue. The letter # is an upward hook, representing the
tip of the tongue touching the gums. The letter 7 is taken from the
Chinese pictograph ‘mouth’. After relating the palatals, dentals, etc., to
the five elements and the five musical notes, King Sej ong proceeds to
form other consonants by addition of strokes. The forms of his basic
consonants already existed in music notation, but the vowel system is
entirely new. Horizontal or vertical lines, with dots before or after,
show vowel quality in a logical manner. (Hunmin chongtim, fol. 5 b-6a.)

44
 This alphabet did not replace Chinese characters, but was used for
pronunciation often alternately with Chinese characters. Each syllable
was then written in a unit square, and the practice has continued to the
present day. Later the Korean alphabetic syllables were used for the
grammar words just as in Japanese, giving a mixed script. Some
popular literature, such as the historical novel, was written entirely in
Korean alphabetic syllable groups, and today in North Korea all
literature is in the script. In South Korea the mixed script continues to
be used, and in scientific and technical literature English loan words
tend now to be printed in Roman script.
The addition of strokes by King Sejong as a means of creating new
simple signs was the method used some five centuries previously for
the adaptation of Chinese to the Mongol-type language of the Liao, or
Kidan, in North-east China. Deliberate deformation of semi-cursive
characters enabled a polysyllabic language to be written more or less
phonetically. Lack of textual material has hampered the full decipher-
ment of this language, though an important inscription was discovered
as recently as 1956. After the Liao State, another independent State,
that of the Tanguts, arose in North-west China, speaking a Tibeto-
un-
Burman language. Perhaps encouraged by the possibility of an
from
breakable military code, the inventor of the Tangut script began
built up complex characters partly
elementary shapes and strokes, and
A typical
guided by meaning elements, partly by sound elements.
from
character was defined in the Tangut dictionaries as being derived
in some cases
parts of other characters. The elements themselves are
Kidan, but a complete account has yet
derived from Chinese through
Jurced used a script
to be given of word-formation. The Tungusic
the Mongol
like Kidan but their successors, the Manchus, adopted
script (see p. 16)
A.D. 1036 to 1227,
The Tangut, or Hsi-hsia script was written from
The docum ents in this cursive
and developed its own cursive styles.
ction of the Tangut
writing have not yet been tead. After the destru
the language and script
state by the Mongols in the thirteenth century,
ss, aided by native
were forgotten, and decipherment is in progre
dictionaries.
4, JAPANESE
(Cases 14-15)
own language until they
The Japanese had no means of writing their
as a result of their contacts
borrowed the ideographic Chinese script
of the Christian era.
with China and Korea during the early centuries by
been brought into Japan
Copies of the Confucian classics must have
45
 travellers from Korea in the fourth and fifth centuries, but it was not
until the year 531, according to the official records, that Buddhist
scriptures and images were presented by the King of Paekche (part of
present-day Korea) to the Emperor Kimmei of Japan. From then on the
flow of literature increased greatly. By the last quarter of the sixth
century Buddhism had won a firm foothold in Japan. With it came
great numbers of Buddhist scriptures written in Chinese, which were
copied assiduously in Japan. An entry in the Nihon shoki, Japan’s first
historical record, mentions that in the year 673 a group of scribes were
assembled for the purpose of copying the entire Buddhist canon; and
there still exists today a Buddhist manuscript copied in the year 686 (see
facsimile on screen above Case 15). An even earlier date is claimed for a
commentary on the Lotus sutra believed to have been written by the
scholarly prince Shotoku Taishi in 614-15.
For Japan at this period, China represented the fountain-head of all
knowledge. With no literature of their own the Japanese proceeded in
thoroughgoing fashion to adopt the whole cultural heritage of China
including the literature of Confucian and Buddhist learning. This meant
also the adoption of the Chinese script, which was seen by the Japanese
as an all-powerful vehicle for the dissemination of new knowledge. It
was not possible, however, to apply it directly to the writing of Japa-
nese, which is a fundamentally different language from Chinese. So
although educated Japanese of the time learned Chinese, steeped them-
selves thoroughly in the Confucian classics, and themgelves wrote works
in this foreign idiom, the problem of how to represent the Japanese
spoken language in written form remained. Chinese characters could
convey ideas but they could not in themselves show the grammatical
inflections and syntax of Japanese. A way had to be found of adapting
and conventionalising this foreign script to make it capable of conveying
the sounds of the native tongue.
This was done in two ways. Some Chinese characters were used for
their meaning but pronounced as Japanese words, without tegard to
their Chinese pronunciation. Others wete used phonetically (taking the
7
sound borrowed along with the character) to represent the syllables of
native Japanese words, This meant writing a Chinese character for each
syllable, a principle already adopted in China for another language,
Sanskrit, to enable Buddhist texts to be spelt out in Chinese.
The two methods outlined above were employed in the Koji,
Japan’s first literary work completed in the year 712, and in the great
poetical anthology the Manydshi#, completed about 760 (see Case 15).
The poems in the Manydshi ate written in Chinese characters used
sometimes for their meaning but more commonly for their sound; in
46
the latter case they are known as Manydgana. The next step in the
development of a specifically Japanese script was the modification and
simplification’ of these ‘phonetic’ characters to form a systematic
syllabary (Kana) with fixed phonetic values. During the eighth-tenth
centuries two such syllabaries were evolved. The Kasakana is a squate,
formal type of script formed from isolated parts of Chinese characters ;
the Hiragana is a rounded, more flowing script derived from the cursive
form of full Chinese characters. (See Case 15 for examples of both Kana
scripts and texts illustrating them.)
The Japanese language could now theoretically be written entirely in
these Kana syllables, and much poetry and prose literature of the Heian
period (tenth-twelfth centuries) was in fact written in Kana throughout,
ot with a slight admixture of Chinese elements. (See the facsimile page
from a twelfth-century manuscript of the Thirty-six Poets exhibited in
Case 14.) But already Chinese characters had gained too firm a hold to
be abandoned. However suitable Kana might be for writing native
Japanese poetry, the developing literary language of Japan needed a
richer vocabulary. Borrowing from Chinese continued therefore, side
by side with the use of Kana, and by the end of the Heian period (end of
twelfth century) a mixed Chinese/Japanese script known as Kana-
of
majiri had been evolved. This has remained the normal medium
written Japanese to the present day. It consists of Chinese characters
supplemented by Kana symbols, the latter supplying verbal and adjec-
It is
tival inflections, particles, and the minor grammatical elements.
a
thus a combination of two systems, ideographic and- phonetic;
uninflected
mixture of ideas and sounds. Words of Chinese origin, most
written in Chinese
Japanese words, and the stems of inflected words ate
ion of
characters, to be read either in pure Japanese or in an approximat
character
the Chinese sound that was borrowed along with the written
be determined
many centuries ago. Often the cortect reading can only
Japanese system of writing is a
by the context. By any standards, the
c and syllabic
complicated one. In its combination of ideographi
it is unusual among
elements, and in its multiplicity of possible readings,
ways of writing Kana-
the world’s languages. (Examples of the many
majiri can be seen in Case 14.)
script existed as
Although, as we have seen, this mixed phonetic
for writing classical
early as the Heian petiod and became the vehicle
Japanese, learned men in
literature such as the Tale of Genji, in pure
enth century continued
Japan from medieval times until the mid-ninete
philo sophical works in an
to write serious historical, literary and
monks of medieval
approximation of literary Chinese, much as the
For Japanese readers,
Europe wrote in a kind of debased Latin.
AT
 however, this was a foreign language which could be read only with
difficulty and often only with the aid of special reading marks, some of
which indicated the order in which the Chinese characters were to be
understood, whilst others supplied the necessary verbal and adjectival
endings to enable the words to be read as Japanese. (See the movable-
type edition of Nzhon shoki in Case 14, where the guides to reading can
be seen alongside the Chinese characters.) It is small wonder that this
attificial Sino-Japanese language could be understood by only a small
minority of educated people and that many scholars in the Edo period
(1600-1867) rejected it in favour of a more easily intelligible way of
writing their own language (Kana-majiri).
Literacy had been virtually a monopoly of the upper classes and of the
Buddhist clergy during the early development of Kana-majiri as a
national script from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries. With the rise of
a literate urban population, coupled with the spread of woodblock
ptinting on a large scale in the early seventeenth century, native
literature written in Kana-majiri began to come within easy reach of
ordinary people, especially the teeming townsfolk of Edo, Osaka and
Kyoto. The script was not finally standardised, however, until movable-
type printing was reintroduced from the West in the mid-nineteenth
century. From then on, the block-cutter was no longer free to follow
an individual calligraphic style in cutting Chinese characters in cursive
handwritten form, or Kana symbols in a wide range of permissible
variants. (See examples of block-printed books and different styles of
handwriting in Case 14.) Forced into the mould of metallic type, the
square character reigned supreme and Kana symbols were reduced to
standard forms.
Further developments have occurred in the twentieth century. Kana
orthography has been reformed and simplified, Katakana has come into
general use for spelling out words of foreign origin (though there is an
increasing tendency in modern books, especially scientific writing, to
print such words and names in Roman script instead), and unsuccessful
attempts have been made to encourage the writing of Japanese entirely in
Kana ot in the Roman alphabet. (See the editions of Heike monogatari and
Manyéshi in tomanised Japanese in Case 14.) The forces of tradition, how-
ever, and the great mass of existing literature in Kana-majiri have proved
too strong. Recognising that Chinese characters are an integral and
permanent part of Japanese writing, the Japanese have since the wat con-
tented themselves with an attempt to simplify the situation by reducing
the number of characters in common use. Since 1947 newspapers and
magazines have been restricted to a vocabulaty of less than two thou-
sand characters, but scholarly books continue to use a great many mote.
48
 EXHIBITS

THE SEMITIC ALPHABET

Case I
PALAEO-HEBREW
B.M. 125702
Lachish Ostracon II. 6th century B.c.

SAMARITAN
Or. 2686

Numberts xvi. 1-xxvi. 22. Probably rath century.

756.d.3
Facsimile of Samaritan Passover Service with Hebrew transcription.

ARAMAIC
Pap. CVI B
Papyrus fragment from Elephantine. 5th century B.c.

PAHLAVI
Or. 8115
A certification before witnesses of the sale of a vineyard. Parchment.
Ist century B.C.
MANDAIC
Or. 9334
An inscription on lead of magical content. 7th-8th century A.D.
Add. 23602.A
Portions of the Drasha dh‘-Yahya. Probably 17th century.

Case 2
SYRIAG
Add. 12150
A manuscript containing the Recognitions of Clement of Rome, the
Discourses of Titus against the Manichaeans and the Treatise of
412).
Eusebius on the Theophania. Estrangela hand, A. Gr. 723 (A.D.
Add. 14548
The first part of the works of Gregory Nazianzen. Jacobite hand,
A. Gr. 1101 (A.D. 796).
4 49 BMA
Or. 9046
Téghurta dh'-Heérakledhis, ‘the Bazaar of Heraclides’ by Nestorius,
Patriarch of Constantinople. Nestorian hand, A.D. 1906.
Add. 14664
Fragment of a Lectionary from the Gospels. Palestinian hand, roth—-11th
century A.D.

HEBREW
Case 3
Or. 2211
Latter Prophets, with Targum. Square character. Tiberian and Baby-
lonian vocalisation. Yemenite hand. Dated San‘a, A. Contr. 1786
(A.D. 1475).
Or. 4445
Pentateuch, accompanied by Masorah Magna and Parva. Square
character. Babylonian hand. Early roth century.
Add. 14762
Haggadhah, ot Passover Service according to the Ashkenazi tite.
Ashkenazi (German) square and mashait (rabbinic) writing of the 15th
century.
Or. 2626
Pentateuch, vol. 1 of an illuminated copy of the Hebrew Bible in
3 volumes. Dated Lisbon, Kislév, a.m. 5243 (A.D. 1482). Sephardi
(Spanish) square character.
93.5-18 .1
Torah Scroll. 19th century.
Add. 15423
Pentateuch. Italian hand of the 14th—15th century. Mashait character.

Case 4
Or. 8212 (166)
A document in Persian (written in the Hebrew character) found
at Dandan-Uylik, Khotan, in Chinese Turkestan. Persian mashait
character, 8th century A.D.
Or. 5529
Letter, dated the 13th of Tammi in the year 987 of the destruction of
the Second Temple (A.D. 1055). Square with some mashait writing.
From the Cairo Genizah.
Or. 5519
Autograph Responsa of Moses ben Maim6n (Maimonides) (a.p. 113 5-
1204). Written in Judaeo-Arabic. From the Cairo Genizah.
5O
Add. 18685
Sépher Misvith Katan. A code by Isaac ben Joseph of Corbeil. Ashkenazi
mashait writing of the 14th century.
Add. Ch. 71355
Starr or charter of the Jewish community of Northampton, ca.
A.D. 1271. Hebrew and Latin. Anglo-French cursive hand
Add. 27210
Haggadhah, ot Passover Service according to the Sephardi rite. Sephardi
square character of the 14th century.
1902.b.4
Facsimile of a Hebrew manuscript from the Synagogue in K’ai-feng-fu.
Published in Shanghai, 1851. Chinese hand. Square character.
Letter of H. N. Bialik. Dated London, 1931. Cursive writing. (Loan
from a private collection.)
Harl. 5504
Commentary on the Pentateuch by Moses ben Nahman (Nahmanides).
North African Sephardi hand of the 15th century. Mashait character.

Case 5
Add. 15978
Sépher Malmadh hat- Talmidhim. Ethico-philosophical discourses on the
Pentateuch by Jacob Anatoli. Dated a.m. (5) 164 (A.D. 1404). Italian
mashait writing.
Harl. 5716
Arba‘ah Tarim. A code by Jacob ben Asher. Dated A.M. 5235
(A.D. 1475). Sephardi mashait charactet.
Harl. 5704
(5) 274
Midrash on the Minor Prophets. Dated Tivoli (Italy), A.M.
(a.p. 1514). North African Sephardi hand. Mashait charactet.
Harl. 5698
er.
Mishneh Thorab of Moses ben Maimon. Small Sephardi square charact
Dated A.M. 5232 (A.D. 1472).
Add. 27071
ment,
Mabdzor. Festival Prayers for the New Year and the Day of Atone
g of the
etc. Translated into Judaeo-German. Ashkenazi cursive writin
15th—16th century.
Add. 27062
Jacob Cordovero.
Commentary on the Tikk ané hax-Z ahar by Moses ben
Dated a.M. 5344 (A.D. 1584). Italian cursive hand.
jt ~
 Case I9
SOGDIAN
Or. 8212 (95)
A letter sent by a merchant in China to Samarkand. A.D. 313.
Or. 8212 (81)
A fragment of a story about the Persian hero, Rustam. 8th century
ADs
Or. 8212 (86)
A letter in cursive Sogdian script. 8th—9th century A.D.

UIGHUR
Or. 8212 (104)
Sekix Yiikmek. An apoctyphal Buddhist sutra. 8th century A.D.
Or. 8212 (109)
A Buddhist religious work of tantric content. A.D. 1350.
Or. 8212 (178)
Khwastaneft. The Manichaean Confession of Sins. 8th-9th century A.D.
Or. 8193

A miscellany of Eastern Turkish works written in the Uighur character

copied at Yezd in A.H. 835/A.D. 1431.

RUNIC TURKISH
Or. 8212 (76)

A teturn of receipts into the quartermaster’s store and their issue.

Before A.D. 770.
Or. 8212 (78-79)
A collection of proverbs. 8th-9th century.
Or. 8212 (161)
A fortune-telling manual. 8th-9th century.

MONGOL
Or. 6972
Meng-ku-txu-yiin. \ Mongol-Chinese dictionary of rhymes. 14th century.
Pa-ssce-pa script.
Add. 27568

A fragment of the Mongol version of the Kanjur. 18th century.

Or. 6790

Volume 41 of the official history of the Ch’ing (Manchu) Dynasty.

19th century.
52
Or. 6975
A collection of vocabularies arranged according to subject in Manchu,
Chinese and Kalmyk. ca. A.D. 1700.

ARABIC

Case 7
Or. 15

Passport on papyrus. Archaic cursive script dated A.H. 133 (A.D. 750).
Add. 11737
Koran fragments on vellum. Meccan script. 9th-roth century.
Or. 2165

Koran on vellum. Ma’7/ script. 9th century.

Or. 1397

Koran fragments on vellum. Kufic script. roth century.

Or. 1562

Koran fragments on vellum. Mash& script. 9th-1oth century.

Add. 11735
Koran on vellum. Bent Kufic script. roth century.
Add. 11736
Koran sections on vellum. Bent Kufic. 1oth—-11th century.
Or. 11393

Koran fragment on vellum leaf. Bent Kufic. roth—-11th century.

Add. 7213
Koran. Bent Kufic. roth—-11th century.
Or. 12884
Koran. Bent Kufic. 11th century.
Or. 3326

Koran. Archaic anticipation of Naskhi. 12th century.

Or. 6573
in archaic Naskhi
Koran sections. Bent Kufic with Persian commentary
script. 13th-14th century.
Add. 7214
1036).
Koran. Archaic Naskhi, dated A.H. 427 (A.D.

Case 8
Or. 1270
in Valencia ca.
Koran on vellum. Andalusian sctipt, written probably
wi, 1150.
Or, 12523
century.
Koran on vellum. Maghribi script. 13th-14th
53
Or. 1405

Koran. Maghribi, written in Morocco in A.H. 975 (A.D. 1568).

Or. 12880
Koran. Brhari script. 14th-15th century.
Add. 18163
Koran. Indian Thw/uth script. 15th century.
Or. 74.d.23
Koran. West African (Nigerian) script reproduced in facsimile. ca.
1960.
14565. bb, 100 pt. 1
Arabic book cover printed in five different styles of Arabic script.
Beirut, 1961.

Case 9
Or. 1009
Koran. Ja/i/ script.-13th century.
Add. 22406
Koran. Ja/i/, written in Egypt by Ibn al-Wahid in a... 704 (A.D. 1304).
Or. 1401

Koran. Jalil. 14th century.

Or. 4945
Koran. Ja/i/, written at Mosul in a.H. 710 (A.D. 1310).
Or. 12809
Koran. Naskhi, written in Jerusalem in A.H. 792 (A.D. 1390).
Or. 12898

Al-Muhit fi ’l-lughah by Al-Sahib ibn ‘Abbad. Naskbi with Kufic

headings, dated a.H. 760 (A.D. 1359).
Or. 1339

Koran. Ja/i/. 14th century.

Or. 848

Koran. A/-Masabifi al-Mul#ki script. 14th century.

Case IO
PERSIAN
Or. 6288

Takwim al-sibbah. A Persian translation of an Arabic work on hygiene

by Ibn Butlan. Naskhi. a.. 517 (A.D. 1123).
54
Or. 7942
Divan i Khakani. Poetical works. Naskbi of a cursive character.
A.H. 664/A.D.21265-6.
Or. 6410

A deed for the sale of land from Khotan. Naskhi inclining to Ta‘lik.
A.H. 501/A.D. 1107-8.
Or. 11398
Divan i Salman i Sdvajt. atly Nasta‘lik. Poetical works. a.H. 794/
A.D. 1393.
Or. 11846
Divan i Hafiz Sa‘d. Poetical works. Nasta‘lik. A.H. 864/A.D. 1459.
Or. 4124
Poems of Hilali. Nasta‘/ik. AH. 957/A-D. 1550.
Or. 4110

An anthology of Persian poetry, without title or author’s name.

Nasta‘ik. 15th century.
Or. 4679
Persian
Copies of various treaties and conventions concluded by the
government. Shikasteh hand. A.H. 1272/A.D. 1855-6.
Or. 2953
Vamik u ‘Azra. A tomantic poem by Nami. Shikasteh-amiz hand.
A.H. 1262/A.D. 1845-6.
Add. 27271
Highteen specimens of Persian penmanship, in the Tarassul style.
A.H. 1225/A.D. 1810-II.

TURKISH
Case 17
Add. 7851
translated from the Persian by
Kisas ul-anbiya. A history of the Prophets
Rabghizi. Ta‘/k. 15th century.
Or. 4126
i. A.H. 798/A.D. 1396.
Diwan i Kadi Burhan el-din. Poetical works. Naskh
Harl. 1815
Divani-kirmast hand. 17th
Selected letters of ‘Ali Celebi Kinalizade.
century.
Or. 10897
by Ahmed Resmi. R/&a hand.
A collection of historical works
A.H. 1268/A.D. 1851-2.
55
 Screen
Add. 22135
A berat certificate granted by the Sultan to Samuel Buty, Consul in
Cyprus. Divani. A.H. 1088/A.D. 1677.
Or. 11559

Four firmans issued for the protection of the Fourth Earl of Caernarvon
and others on their travels through Turkey. Divani. a.u. 1250/A.D.
183 4-5—A.H. 1269/A.D. 1852-3.

Case 6
URDU
Add. 5629
A miscellany dated a.H. 1153/A.D. 1740-1-A.H. 1158/A.D. 1745-6.
Naskhi.
Add. 16880
Romance of Ratan Sen and Padmiavati. By Hans. Naskb. Late 18th
century.

SINDHI
Or. 6533
Religious poems. Naskhi. Early 18th century.

PUSHTU
Or. 4228
Poems of Mirza Khan Ansari. Naskbi. Av. 1101/A.D. 1690.

Screen
MALAY
Harl. Ch. 43.A.6
A letter from the Raja Bendhahara Paduka of Birni to the ‘English
Captain’ at Jambi. Naskhi. 17th century.
Or. 9484
A proclamation by Sir Thomas Raffles. Dated September 12th, 18rr.
Naskhi.

Case I
ETHIOPIC AND SOUTH ARABIAN
B.M. 48480
Bronze plate with inscription in raised South Arabian chatacters.
Or. 480

Octateuch. 15th century.

56
Or. 590
A richly illustrated hymn-book. 18th century.
Or. 11390 ,
A medico-magical work in Amharic. Probably early roth century.

SCRIPTS ADAPTED FROM THE

GREEK ALPHABET
Case 12
COPTIC AND NUBIAN
Or. 9271
A fragment of a fine papyrus of the Didache. 5th century.
Add. 5114
Pistis Sophia. A gnostic text. 4th-5th century.
Or. 5299.i
A biblical fragment. 4th-5th century.
Or. 7594
Deuteronomy, Jonah and Acts. Early 4th century.
Or. 6784
Discourse on Mary Theotokos attributed to Cyril of Jerusalem. 9th-
roth century.
Or. 9525.1
A legal agreement with the signatures of witnesses. Late 7th century.
Or. 6805

A work on the miracles of St Menas and a treatise on the Nicene

Canons. 1oth century.
Or. 1316

The four Gospels. Second half of the 17th century.

ARMENIAN AND GEORGIAN

Or. 81

Gospels. A.D. 1181.

Add. 19730
Epistles. 13th century.
Or. 5459
A miscellany of historical and geographical works. A.D. 1616.
Or. 5315
Musha. A monthly journal of the Georgian Socialist Revolutionary Party.
A.D. 1889-91.
Sloane 1338
A book of prayers. A.D. 1621.
57
 NORTH INDIAN LANGUAGES
Case 26

Seal
Seal and an impression in the undeciphered script of the Indus Valley
Civilisation. Before 1500 B.C.
Stone fragment
Portion of the Sixth Pillar Edict of ASoka. Probably from the Delhi
Mirath pillar. 238 B.c.
Stone fragment
Inscribed side of a stone reliquary cist from Sanchi. Brahmi of the
Ist century B.C.
Intaglio
Carnelian intaglio of the Gupta period and an impression. Inscribed in
the Gupia character. 4th century.
Clay plaque
Buddhist votive plaque from Nalanda with Kufila (S:iddhamatrka)
legend. Between 9th and 11th centuries.
Or. 8212 (195)

Prajité-paramita-hrdaya-s titra in Sanskrit and Chinese transliteration from

Central Asia (Tunhuang). Sanskrit text in early Siddbam. End of the
first millennium A.D.
N.xv.350

Document on leather. North-western Prakrit in the Kharosthi character

from Central Asia (Niya). 3rd century A.D.
Or. 8212 (1038, 1422)

Palm-leaf and birch-bark fragments of Sanskrit texts from Central Asia

(Koyumal). Early Central Asian Gupsa. 4th-5th centuries A.D.
Or. 9613 (27-8)
Sad-dharma-pundarika-stitra. Fragments in calligraphic Central Asian
uptight Gupta. Second half of the 1st millennium A.D.
Or. 11878 B, A-B

Sad-dharma-pundarika-sitra. Fragments from a manuscript found at

Gilgit (Kashmir). Central Asian upright Gupia. Second half of the
rst millennium A.D.
Ind. Ch. 49
Copper-plate grant in Sanskrit. Nagar from Benares. A.D, 1124.

58
Ind. Ch. 42
Copper-plate grant in Sanskrit. Nandindgari from Chikka Bagewadi
(Belgaum). A.D. 1249.
Or. 8212 (180)
Part of a Tibetan poem. Early Tibetan character with head-mark from
Central Asia (Tunhuang). 8th-9th century.
Or. 6724
Folio from the first volume of the Tibetan Buddhist canon (Kanjur).
Formal Tibetan character with head-mark. 18th century.
Or. 11376
bSlab bya mu thi las phren ba. Tibetan verses. Cursive Tibetan ‘headless’
character. 18th century.
19999 f. 65
Mkha’ ’gro gsang gcod. Printed Tibetan of the ‘headless’ type. Delhi, 1964.

Case 25
I4I21.g.15
The First Lesson in Oriya addressed to Candidates for Missionary
Labour in Orissa. Cuttack, 1844. Pages 4-5, including a table of printed
Oriya characters.
Or. 11689

Part of the Bhdgavata-purana in Sanskrit. Oriya character of the 16th

century. Palm-leaf.
Or. 7563

Manipuri manuscript written on thin plates of wood. 19th century(?).

Or. 5061
Manuscript on birch-bark written in an unidentified language (Tibeto-
Burman?) non-Indo-Aryan probably from the Assam district. Variety
of the Assamese character, perhaps of the 18th century.
Or. 12062
Hymns in Assamese to Rama and Krsna, written on thin sheets of wood.
Assamese character of the 18th century.
Or. 6902

Asta-sahasrika Prajfia-paramita. Palm-leaf in the ‘ancient Northern

character’ of Eastern India and Nepal. Sanskrit. Probably of the roth
century.
Or. 2208
Vidyavali. Sanskrit in the hooked Nepalese character. Palm-leaf.
My 1222,
ao
Or. 1080
Nama-samgiti. Sanskrit and Newari in the Nepalese character. 19th
century.
Or. 11382

Tara-namaskaraikavim
Saka. Sanskrit in the Rafja character.

Case 24
Add. 15414
Panica-tantra. Sanskrit in Devandgari of the 17th-18th centuries.
Or. 5149
Kalpa-sdtra. Prakrit in Jain Ndgar7. a.p. 1464.
Or. 6846
Nila-mata-purana. Sanskrit in the Devanagari of Kashmir. 18th-19th
centuries.
14156 de. 155
Samskyt aur samskrti. A Hindi work by Rajendra Prasad. Printed
Devanagari. Delhi, 1962.
~
Or. 11878A (44)
Samgha-raksitavadana from the Divyavaddna. Bitch-bark folio from Gilgit
(Kashmir) in a precursor of the Sarada character. Sanskrit. 7th century.
Or. 67588

Tarka-bhasa by Kegava Misra. Saradé on bitch-bark. Sanskrit. Earlier

than the 18th century.
Or. 12093

A Geography of the Panjab in Panjabi. Gurmukhi of the 19th century.

Or. 71.b.12
The Holy Bible. . .translated into the Mooltani Language. Serampore,
1819. Printed Multani character.
14155 e I
The New Testament...translated by the Surat Missionaries. Surat,
1827. Gujarati. Printed Gujarati character.
I412I aa. 4
The Gospel according to St John. Bhojpuri printed in the local Kaithi
character. Calcutta, rort.
Add. 26522
Simhasan Battist, Gujarati in the Kaithi character with continuous top-
line. 19th century.
Or. 6391
Battal Pacisi, Marathi in the Modi character. A.D. 1830.
60
Or. 3567 (a)
Ganga-krtya-viveka. Sanskrit in the Bengali character. Palm-leaf.
A.D. 8496. 5
Or. 3567 (b)
Gaya-vidhi. Sanskrit in the Bengali character. Palm-leaf. 16th century.
Add. 5595
A portion of the Mahd-bharata in Bengali. Bengali character of the 18th
century.
14121 1,27
Palli-prakrti, by Rabindranath Tagore. Bengali printed character with
a reproduction of Tagore’s handwriting. Calcutta, 1962.

SINHALESE
Or. 11681

First sheet of a copper-plate manuscript of the A sirvisopama-siatra-

dharma-desandva. Sinhalese in the Sinhalese character. 17th or 18th
century.
14165.kk.5
Adhyapana Vidyava, by W. R. P. SGmaratna. Sinhalese printed character.
Colombo, 1961.

SOUTH INDIAN LANGUAGES

Case 20
TAMIL
Add. 26110

A Tamil-Latin dictionary written in 1744 by the Jesuit missionary

Constanze Gioseffo Eusebio Beschi (1680-1746).
Or. 2728
A igth-century manuscript of Kampan’s Ramdyanam (Book 4: Kis-
kindha-kanda). The stanzas are separated and the absence of the inherent
short a is shown by a dot above the consonant.
Or. 11989

An 18th-century manuscript forming part of Villiputtirar’s Mahda-

bharatam. The individual words and stanzas are not separated and
nothing indicates the absence of the short a.
Sloane 3027
An explanation of the Gospels written at the beginning of the 18th
century by a member of the Lutheran mission in Tranquebar.
61
Or. 2725
A metrical vocabulary, at one time part of the collection of manu-
scripts at Tanjore Palace. 18th century.
Or. 2724
Nannal. A work on classical grammar, with commentary. Dated 1800.

GRANTHA AND VAT Ee at10)

Or. I1731

A part of the Visnu-purana. Sanskrit written in Grantha chatacters.

18th century.
Ind. Chart. 4
The Vélvikudi grant of a Pandya king. The Sanskrit part is written in
Grantha, the Tamil part in Va/feruttu characters. 8th century A.D.
Ind. Chart. 28
Grant of a Pallava king written in Sanskrit and Tamil. The script is a
mixture of Grantha, Tamil and V/a¢feruttu characters. 8th century A.D.

Cas? 21 ‘

MALAYALAM
Add. 7126
Nala-caritam. A Malayalam poem by Kalakatt’ Kufijan Nambyar. 1800.
Add. 7123

Ramanujan Eruttacchan’s Malayalam version of Adhyadtma-Rama-

yanam. Late 18th century.
Add. 7127
Agni-pravésam, a ballad on a story belonging to the Rama legend.
About 1800.

TELUGU
Or. 12018

A copper alloy plate recording acts of a Governing Body of the Five

Classes of Craftsmen. Late medieval or early modern period.
Or. 5397
A 19th-century manuscript of Ranga Natha’s Ramayana (Bala- and
Ayodhya-kanda).
Or. 2740

A copy of Nannaya-Bhatta’s Mahabharata. 18th century.

Sloane 2762
A bond written in the year 1755.

62
 KANNADA
Add. 5358
A letter of Haidar ‘Ali addressed to the commandant of Palghat.
18th century.
Add. 14387
Copies of inscriptions taken from the Jain temples in Belgaum.
18th century.
Add. 14370
Pasupatastra, an episode from the Mahabharata narrating the combat
between Arjuna and Siva. An 18th-century manuscript with covers
made of sandalwood.
Ind. Chart. 11
Grant of the Rastrakita, Govinda III. Written in Old-Kannada in the
year A.D. 804.

Or. 4539
Astrological calculations written in Kannada and Telugu, with quota-
tions from the Sanskrit. 18th century.

MAINLAND SOUTH-EAST ASIA

Case 23
TELAT
Or. 4830

A folding book on divination, arranged according to the yearly animal

cycle, with predictions illustrated in colour according to the signs of the
Zodiac. Written in several hands. Early 19th century.

Or. 11827

Annals of Ayuthia (Siam), compiled at Bangkok in the reign of King

Rama I. Copied in an elegant hand in the early 19th century.

Add. 12261
Sang sin chai. A Siamese version of a classical narrative romance in verse,
widely known among the Tai-speaking peoples. Written in an un-
sophisticated hand in late 18th century style.

THAI IN CAMBODIAN SCRIPT

Add. 15347
Phra malai. A pteaching text originally derived from a Ceylonese
Buddhist work, but locally developed as a popular story in the countries
of mainland South-east Asia, especially Thailand and Laos. Mid-19th
century.
63
 CAMBODIAN
Or. 7560A
Ream-ker. A version of the Rama epic, written in Cambodian script in
yellow ink on black paper. Copied in the 19th century.

LAO
Add. 22712
The tale of Chanthakhat, a Buddhist folk tale. Written in Lao script in
the 19th century.
VIETNAMESE
Or. 8218
Kim Van Kieu, based on a poem by Nguyen Du. From a collection of
Vietnamese plays written in Chinese and chu-nom characters. Copied in
the 19th century.

I291I,.V.1
Dictionatrium Anamitico-Latinum. A Vietnamese-Latin dictionary
edited by Jean Louis Taberd. Serampore, 1838.

LOLO
Or. 3662

A manuscript written on silk in the syllabic script of the Lolo (Yi)

people of South-west China. 19th century.

MOSO
Or. I1417A-11426A

Magical invocations and prayers in the pictographic script of the Moso

(Na-khi) people of South-west China. 19th century.

Screen: writing on palm-leaf

THAI
Add. 12210
Phra aiyakan laksana kralakan. Laws for officers of Courts of Justice,
written on palm-leaf. Probably 19th century.

CAMBODIAN
Add. 11553
Iti-vuttaka atthakatha. Commentary on a Buddhist text in Pali, written
in Khom script. Palm-leaf. Probably 19th century.
Or. 1245

Parts of the Vessantara-jataka, and other Buddhist texts. Pali in Cam-

bodian script. Palm-leaf. Probably roth century.
64
 LAO
Or. 5270

A Lao version of Vessantara-jataka, with some Pali insertions. Palm-

leaf. Probably roth century.
Or. 12401
Suttanipata atthakatha. A Buddhist commentaty written in Lao sacred
script. Palm-leaf. Probably roth century.

BURMESE
Or. 3446
A memorial presented to Sir Arthur Phayre when Commissioner in
Burma, by the citizens of Moulmein. Written in gold letters on ivory
plates. Dated 1858.
Or. 5340A and B
Early Burmese inscription on gold plates. Pali Buddhist text in archaic
characters. 5th or 6th century A.D.

Or. 4949
Kammavaca. A set of disciplinary formulas for the regulation of
Buddhist monastic life. Written on gilded and lacquered palm-leaves
in Burmese square characters. 18th century.

Or. 11936

Bhikkhuni-patimokkha. The code of discipline for the order of Buddhist

nuns, extracted from the Vzwaya. Pali in Burmese script. Palm-leaf.

MON
Or. 5843
A work on Buddhist relics preserved in various shrines. 19th century.
Palm-leaf.
Or. 9239

Legendary history of King Asah of Pegu, in partially rhyming prose.

Copied in 1904. Palm-leaf.

ISLAND SOUTH-EAST ASIA

Case 22
JAVANESE
Egerton 765
Letter from a native Prince, inscribed in Javanese characters on a thin
sheet of gold. 18th—19th century.
Add. 12301
Babad Pa-Chinan. A history of the Chinese war in Java, 1741-43. 18th-
19th century.
5 65 BMA
Ac. 7519
Reproduction of the Javanese inscription of Changgal, from an article
of Kern: Sanskrit—inscriptie van Java, van den Jare 654 caka—A.D. 732,
in ‘Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-, en Volkenkunde van Ned. Indié’,
deel 10, 24¢ stuk, 1885.
BALINESE
Or. 12971
Letter of introduction from the Danish merchant Mads Johannsen
Lange to the ruler of Tabanan in Bali, requesting permission for the
botanist John Henshall to travel through his territory plant-collecting.
Written on palm-leaf in Malay in the Balinese script. Dated 1852.
BATAK
Add. 19383
A magical text written on leaves of bark in the Batak script of North
Sumatra. The text treats of pormiahan, a receptacle for magic ointment.
roth century.
BUGINESE
Add. 12347
A Buginese recension of the Malay work Hikdyat Hamzah, from Celebes.
roth century. x

REDJANG
Or. 12986

A Redjang manuscript from South Sumatra, inscribed on strips of

bamboo. The language is Malay and the writing is a local Redjang
script known as Ka-ga-nga. 19th century.

THE CHINESE SYSTEM OF WRITING

CHINESE
Case 18
1947 7-12.335
Bronze mirror decorated with figures of the gods Hsi Wang Mu and
Tung Wang Kung, a tiger and a winged deer. Early 3rd century A.p.
The inscription consists of twenty-six characters: ‘The Shang Fang
made this mirror, truly of great workmanship. Above are immortals
who know not old age...’
1955 10-26,1, 2

Lacquer wine-cup from the Chinese settlement at Lo-lang, Korea. The

inscription around the base, incised in the lacquer, names the craftsmen
who made the cup and dates it to the 4th year of Yian-Shih (A.D. 4).
1947 7-12..334
Bronze mirror made in the Shang Fang. Inscribed in 4-shw, with four
rhyming couplets describing the ornament and ending: ‘may yout life
66
equal bronze and stone, like that of marquises and princes’. Late 1st
century B.C.
1936 I1-18.271 _
Bronze mirror with benedictory inscription in squared character. rst
century A.D.
1957 11-19 .1
Bronze mitror with benedictory inscription in squared character and
an astronomical design. 1st century A.D.
1953 I2-1I5.1

Bronze ritual halberd (Ao) decorated with the characters ¢a yi, probably
the name of a sacrifice. 12th—11th century B.c.
1947 7-12. 426
Bronze spearhead inlaid in gold with eight characters of “bird script’:
“Chou (Shao?) King of Yiieh, may he himself (for ever?) use it’. 4th
century B.C.
1945 10-17 .196
Bronze mirror decorated with the ram from the Zodiac. Dated a.p. 121.
Or. 7694
Chinese oracle bones 1592 and 1554 (rejoined in one piece). cz. 1000 B.C,
Transcription of Chinese characters on oracle bones 1592 and 1554.
1936 11-18 ,2

Bronze vessel, the Hsing Hou Kuei. Late 11th century B.c.
15235.a.91/2
W. A. C. H. Dobson, Early Archaic Chinese, 1962, pp. 193, 194 and 195,
showing a facsimile of the Hsing Hou Kuei inscription, a modern tran-
scription and English translation of the text.
Or. 7694
Chinese oracle bone 1630. ¢a. 1000 B.C.
15014.f.9
B. Karlgren, Grammata Serica Recensa, Stockholm, 1957. Shows early
forms of Chinese characters similar to those occurring in oracle bone
1630.
Or. 8211/697
Inscribed wood slip: chuan style. Han period.
Or. 8211/1, 307, 372, 432
Inscribed wood slips: 4-shu style. Han period.
Or. 8212/327 Or. 8211/758
Examples of style, based on ’ai-shu, not greatly different from modern
handwriting. Han and Chin periods.
67
Or. 8211/492, 487, 577
Cursive handwriting, grass style. Han and Chin periods.
Or. 8211/875, 874
Cursive handwriting, running style. Han and Chin periods.
Or. 8211/762
Cursive handwriting, grass style. Han and Chin periods.
S. 5791
Tang dynasty ink-rubbing, from a stone inscription based on the calli-
graphy of Ou-yang Hsiin. Found at Tunhuang.
S. 4010 S.2778 S.2192 S.1724

4th century; 6th century; 7th century; 8th century, continued in roth.
Seties of documents from Tunhuang illustrating the development of
the monastic hand, 4th—r1oth centuries A.p.

Case 17
S. 618 S. 3392 S. 5257 S. 4453 Z

Series of documents from Tunhuang, showing a variety of cursive

hands. 7th—1oth centuries.
S. 6983

Chinese manuscript showing use of reed pen in the period of Tibetan

occupation of Tunhuang.
PI
Block-printed document from Tunhuang containing Buddhist verses
on the twenty-four examples of filial piety. Probably 9th century a.p.

Case 16
Or. 8625

A ‘study’ of the handwriting of Chao Meng-fu and Tung Ch’i-ch’ang,

with appropriate seals. Early 19th century?
Or. 12674
Yung-lo Ta-tien, chapter 6933. Part of a vast encyclopaedia, copied in
1567 from the original manuscript completed in 1408.
15302.b.3
Handwriting of Hsii Kuang-ch’i, an associate of the early Jesuits in
China. Late Ming dynasty.
15302.b.4
Facsimile of a letter by Hu Shih, 1948. The lines indicate book titles or
proper names.
15530.b,43
Painting of an abacus by Ch’i Pai-shih. Peking, 1963.
68
S. 388

Simplified characters of the 9th century. List of popular abbreviations

of characters, some of which have become standard in China in the
2oth century.
15118 .b.31
Seng king tsih Joh. Phonetic script used for the Shanghai dialect, 19th
century.
S.S. 79/28
Two issues of the periodical Jingji Kunchongxue (Economic Entomology),
illustrating simplified characters and the use of the Roman alphabet as
an auxiliary script. October 1964 and January 1965.

Case I3
KOREAN
Or. 7875
Okhwan kuibong. A historical novel written in Aangil, the Korean
alphabet. Fine court hand of the roth century.
16509.a.4
Hunmin chingim. King Sejong’s explanation of the Korean alphabet
designed by him in 1446. Modern facsimile of a block-print.

: TANGUT
Or. 12380/3114
Regular block-print style. 12th century.
Or. 12380/2939
A block-print based on standard careful script. 12th century.
Or. 12380/2322
Manuscript written in a cursive hand. 12th century.

Case I4
JAPANESE
Or. 74.¢.1
Yokyoku hyakuban. A collection of No plays printed with movable
type at the Saga Press, under the direction of Hon’ami Koetsu.
ca. 1605-10.
Or. 61.e.1
Yuriwaka daijin. A Kiwaka-mai story of the Muromachi period. Hand-
written copy in three rolls, with coloured illustrations. 18th century.
16296 .f£.4
Sanjirokunin-shi. Facsimile of a page from an illuminated manuscript
of the Thirty-six Poets, preserved in the Nishi Honganji Temple,
Kyoto. Original dated early 12th century.
69
Or. 12439

Benkei monogatari. A. Nara-ehon (illustrated manuscript) dealing with

the exploits of Minamoto Yoshitsune and his henchman Benkei.
17th century.
Or. 59.bb.5
Nihon shoki: Jindai no maki. Early history of Japan, written in Chinese,
with guides to Japanese pronunciation added in manuscript beside the
Chinese characters. Printed with movable type by command of the
Emperot Go-Y6zei in 1599.
Or. 59.b.28
Tsurezure-gusa. Essays of a Recluse, by Kenko Hoshi. Block-print
based on the calligraphy of Karasumaru Mitsuhiro. Dated 1613.
Or. 59.aa,I

Heike monogatari. Tales of the Heike Clan, printed in romanised

Japanese at the Jesuit Mission Press at Amakusa in 1592-3. Followed
by Aesop’s Fables and a collection of proverbs, the Kinkushd. ‘This is
the only surviving copy.
I1093.e.22 R
Rémaji_ mannyoshd. Classical verse anthology, the Manydshi, printed
in romanised Japanese. Osaka, 1936.
16274.a.1

Shodé kyoiku xusetsu. A typical modern printed book, teaching the art
of calligraphy, by Onoe Hachiré and Ishibashi Saisui. Tokyo, 1955.
Case I5
16100 ,c.6
Manyosha. Classical anthology of Japanese poetry, written in the 8th
century in Chinese characters used partly for their sound and partly for
their meaning. Printed with movable type in about 1610.
16047.b.10
Kgjtki. Ancient history of Japan, completed in the year 712. The first
work of native Japanese literature. This copy was printed from wood-
blocks in 1803. The pronunciation is indicated in Kana alongside the
Chinese characters.
Or. 6571

Iroha. The Japanese Kana syllabary, following the traditional order of

syllables. Both Katakana and Hiragana forms can be seen in this manu-
script. 17th-18th century.
Or. 12415
A collection of poem-slips (Tanzakv) and other specimens of calli-
gtaphy attributed to eminent poets, Buddhist abbots and princes of the
70
Imperial House. Compiled in the early 19th century. These Japanese
poems are written chiefly in Hiragana.
Or. 970 -

Senjimon. The Chinese ‘Thousand Character Classic’, written in square

formal style by the calligrapher Temmin. 19th century.
16274.C.2

Gydsho senjimon. The same work, in the semi-cursive Gydsho style.

Printed from the handwriting of the modern calligrapher Ishibashi
Saisui. 1957.
16274.C.3

Sdsho senjimon. The same section of the same work, in the fully
cursive Sésho style. Printed from the handwriting of the modern calli-
grapher Ishibashi Saisui. 1957.
16271.d.19 (Photographic print taken from)
Kongojé darani-kyo. Facsimile of the earliest surviving manuscript
written in Japan. A Buddhist sutra copied in the year 686.
Or. 1605
Buddhist Proclamation. A public notice in scroll form appealing for
funds from the laity for repairing and rebuilding parts of the T6ji
temple in Kyoto. Dated 15th year of Eish6, 1518.

aft

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1. Pentateuch accompanied by the Masorah Magna and Parva. Square Hebrew.

Babylonian hand. Early roth century. Or. 4445, f. 98r.
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ns of Clement of Rome
and other works. Syriac. A.D. 412. Add.
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8th century. Or. 8212 (104), lines 82-102.
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7. Diwan of Hafiz Sa‘d. Persian. Nasta‘lik script. A.D. 1459.

Or. 11846, ff. 66 v—67r.
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8. Octateuch. Ethiopic. 15th century. Or. 480, f. 100v.

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Or. 7594, f. 108 v.
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18. Tsurezure-gusa. Essays of a recluse by Kenko Héshi. A blockprint

based on calligraphy. Japanese. a.p. 1613. Or. 59.b.28.
 For Reference
Not to be taken from this room