Ashoka's Edicts and the Root of a Thousand Scripts

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

When the Mauryan emperor Ashoka had his edicts carved into rock faces and stone pillars across the Indian subcontinent in the third century BCE, urging his subjects toward non-violence and moral conduct after his own conversion to Buddhism, he used a script called Brahmi, and in doing so left historians their earliest secure evidence of it. Ashoka's edicts are not necessarily where Brahmi began; some scholars, citing possible pre-Ashokan graffiti marks found on pottery and rock in Tamil Nadu, argue the script or its direct precursors existed earlier still, a question that remains open. What is not in question is Brahmi's legacy. Nearly every native script used across South and Southeast Asia today traces back to it: Devanagari, used for Hindi and Sanskrit; Bengali, Gujarati and Gurmukhi in the north; Tamil, Kannada, Telugu and Malayalam in the south; Sinhala in Sri Lanka; Tibetan, Burmese, Thai, Khmer and Javanese further afield. No other ancestor script anywhere has quite so many living descendants still in daily use by well over a billion people combined. Ashoka's stone edicts, meant to broadcast a ruler's moral message across his empire, turned out also to preserve the root of an entire family of writing systems.