The Brahmi alphabet is the ancestor of most of the 40 or so modern Indian alphabets, and of a number of other alphabets, such as Khmer and Tibetan . It is thought to have been modelled on the Aramaic or Phoenician alphabets, and appeared in India sometime before 500 BC. Another theory is that Brahmi developed from the Indus or Harappa script, which was used in the Indus valley until about 2,000 BC. The earliest known inscriptions in the Brahmi alphabet are those of King Asoka (c.270-232 BC), third monarch of the Mauryan dynasty. Brahmi was used to write a variety of languages, including Sanskrit and Prakrit.


Notable features:

The structure of the Brahmi alphabet is similar to that of modern Indian alphabets: each letters represents a consonant with a inherent vowels /a/. Other vowels were indicated using a variety of diacritics and separate letters.

Letters are grouped according to the way they are pronounced. Many letters have more than one form.

The descendants of the Brahmi alphabet include: Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Khmer, Malayalam, Oriya, Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu, and Tibetan.