Kharosthi

 ( Ancient History Of Afghanistan ) 

Scholars are not in agreement as to whether the Kharosthi script evolved gradually, or was the deliberate work of a single inventor. An analysis of the script forms shows a clear dependency on the Aramaic alphabet but with extensive modifications. Kharosthi seems to be derived from a form of Aramaic used in administrative work during the reign of Darius the Great, rather than the monumental cuneiform used for public inscriptions. One theory suggests that the Aramaic script arrived with the Achaemenid conquest of the Indus Valley in 500 BCE and evolved over the next 200+ years to reach its final form by the 3rd century BCE where it appears in some of the Edicts of Ashoka. However, no intermediate forms have yet been found to confirm this evolutionary model, and rock and coin inscriptions from the 3rd century BCE onward show a unified and standard form. An inscription in Aramaic dating back to the 4th century BCE was found in Sirkap, testifying to the presence of the Aramaic script in present-day Pakistan. According to Sir John Marshall, this seems to confirm that Kharoshthi was later developed from Aramaic. A Guide to Taxila, John Marshall, 1918

While the Brahmi script remained in use for centuries, Kharosthi seems to have been abandoned after the 2nd–3rd century AD. Because of the substantial differences between the Semitic-derived Kharosthi script and its successors, knowledge of Kharosthi may have declined rapidly once the script was supplanted by Brahmi-derived scripts, until its re-discovery by Western scholars in the 19th century.

The Kharosthi script was deciphered separately almost concomitantly by James Prinsep (in 1835, published in the Journal of the Asiatic society of Bengal, India) and by Carl Ludwig Grotefend (in 1836, published in Blätter für Münzkunde, Germany), with Grotefend "evidently not aware" of Prinsep's article, followed by Christian Lassen (1838). They all used the bilingual coins of the Indo-Greek Kingdom (obverse in Greek, reverse in Pali, using the Kharosthi script). This in turn led to the reading of the Edicts of Ashoka, some of which were written in the Kharosthi script (the Major Rock Edicts at Mansehra and Shahbazgarhi).

The study of the Kharosthi script was recently invigorated by the discovery of the Gandhāran Buddhist texts, a set of birch bark manuscripts written in Kharosthi, discovered near the Afghan city of Hadda just west of the Khyber Pass in Pakistan. The manuscripts were donated to the British Library in 1994. The entire set of British Library manuscripts are dated to the 1st century CE, although other collections from different institutions contain Kharosthi manuscripts from 1st century BCE to 3rd century CE,

The numerals, like the letters, are written from right to left. There is no zero and no separate signs for the digits 5–9. Numbers are written additively, so, for example, the number 1996 would be written as .

The Unicode block for Kharosthi is U+10A00–U+10A5F:

• Brahmi
• History of Afghanistan
• History of Pakistan
• Pre-Islamic scripts in Afghanistan

• Kaschgar und die Kharoṣṭhī (1903)

• (1996). 9780195079937, Oxford University Press, Inc. . ISBN 9780195079937
• Harry Falk (1993). 9783823342717, Gunter Narr. ISBN 9783823342717
• Oscar von Hinüber (1990). 9783515056274, Franz Steiner. ISBN 9783515056274
• Richard Salomon (1998). 9780195356663, Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195356663
• Richard Salomon (2025). 9788885320369, Istituto italiano per l'Africa e l'Oriente. ISBN 9788885320369

• Gandhari.org Catalog and Corpus of all known Kharoṣṭhī (Gāndhārī) texts
• Indoskript 2.0, a paleographic database of Brahmi and Kharosthi
• A Preliminary Study of Kharoṣṭhī Manuscript Paleography by Andrew Glass, University of Washington (2000)