Writing and Printing

Bhattiprolu script

The Bhattiprolu script is a variant of the Brahmi script which has been found in old inscriptions at Bhattiprolu, a small village in the erstwhile Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh, India. It is located in the fertile Krishna River delta and the estuary region where the river meets the Bay of Bengal. The inscriptions date to between the 3rd and 1st centuries BCE, putting them among the earliest evidence of Brahmi writing in South India. Bhattiprolu differs from Ashokan Brahmi in two significant ways. First, the letters gh, j, m, l, s are "radically different": m is upside-down compared to Brahmi, while gh appears to derive from g rather than from Semitic heth. Secondly, the inherent vowel has been discarded: A consonant written without diacritics represents the consonant alone. This is unique to Bhattiprolu among the early Indian scripts.

Also on this shelf

See also

• ▸History of advertising
• ▸Castles of Bellinzona
• ▸Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

Uncatalogued shelf

Text from Wikipedia; plate via Wikimedia Commons. Text CC BY-SA 4.0; plate freely licensed (see Commons). Source record. Images and catalogue data are reproduced from open-access collections.