Editing Brahmi script (section)

===Debate on time depth===
[[File:Sanskrit Brhama English alphabets.jpg|thumb|right|Connections between Phoenician (4th column) and Brahmi (5th column). Note that 6th-to-4th-century BCE Aramaic (not shown) is in many cases intermediate in form between the two.]]
[[K. R. Norman|Kenneth Norman]] (2005) suggests that Brahmi was devised over a longer period of time predating Ashoka's rule:<ref name="Hinüber1989">{{cite book|author=Oskar von Hinüber|title=Der Beginn der Schrift und frühe Schriftlichkeit in Indien|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=xiYTAQAAMAAJ|year=1989|publisher=Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur|oclc=22195130|pages=241–245|isbn=9783515056274|access-date=2016-10-24|archive-date=2020-07-27|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200727133141/https://books.google.com/books?id=xiYTAQAAMAAJ|url-status=live}}</ref>

{{blockquote|Support for this idea of pre-Ashokan development has been given very recently by the discovery of sherds at [[Anuradhapura]] in [[Sri Lanka]], inscribed with small numbers of characters which seem to be Brāhmī. These sherds have been dated, by both [[radiocarbon dating|Carbon 14]] and [[thermoluminescence dating|Thermo-luminescence dating]], to pre-Ashokan times, perhaps as much as two centuries before Ashoka.<ref>{{cite book|author=Kenneth Roy Norman|title=Buddhist Forum Volume V: Philological Approach to Buddhism|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=qYyRAgAAQBAJ|year=2005|publisher=Routledge|isbn=978-1-135-75154-8|pages=67, 56–57, 65–73|access-date=2016-10-24|archive-date=2020-07-27|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200727133125/https://books.google.com/books?id=qYyRAgAAQBAJ|url-status=live}}</ref>}}

However, these finds are controversial, see {{slink|Tamil Brahmi|Conflicting theories about origin since 1990s}}.

He also notes that the variations seen in the [[Edicts of Asoka|Asokan edicts]] would be unlikely to have emerged so quickly if Brahmi had a single origin in the chancelleries of the Mauryan Empire.<ref name="dow">Norman, Kenneth R. "The Development of Writing in India and its Effect upon the Pāli Canon". ''Wiener Zeitschrift Für Die Kunde Südasiens'' [Vienna Journal of South Asian Studies], vol. 36, 1992, pp. 239–249. {{JSTOR|24010823}}. Accessed 11 May 2020.</ref> He suggests a date of not later than the end of the 4th century for the development of Brahmi script in the form represented in the inscriptions, with earlier possible antecedents.<ref name="dow" />

[[Jack Goody]] (1987) had similarly suggested that ancient India likely had a "very old culture of writing" along with its oral tradition of composing and transmitting knowledge, because the Vedic literature is too vast, consistent and complex to have been entirely created, memorized, accurately preserved and spread without a written system.<ref>{{cite book |author=Jack Goody |title=The Interface Between the Written and the Oral |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=TepXQMN6lfUC |year=1987 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=978-0-521-33794-6 |pages=110–24 |access-date=2016-10-24 |archive-date=2017-02-25 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170225013254/https://books.google.com/books?id=TepXQMN6lfUC |url-status=live}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |first=Jack |last=Goody |title=Myth, Ritual and the Oral |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=5BJ_PDhpy2QC |year=2010 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=978-1-139-49303-1 |pages=42–47, 65–81 |access-date=2016-10-24 |archive-date=2016-12-24 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20161224160352/https://books.google.com/books?id=5BJ_PDhpy2QC |url-status=live}}</ref>

Opinions on this point, the possibility that there may not have been any writing scripts including Brahmi during the Vedic age, given the quantity and quality of the Vedic literature, are divided. While Falk (1993) disagrees with Goody,{{Sfn|Annette Wilke|Oliver Moebus|2011|pages=182–183}} while [[Walter J. Ong|Walter Ong]] and John Hartley (2012) concur,<ref>{{cite book |first1=Walter J. |last1=Ong |first2=John |last2=Hartley |title=Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Ys8gGDZQHQ4C |year=2012 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=978-0-415-53837-4 |pages=64–69 |access-date=2016-10-24 |archive-date=2016-12-24 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20161224160827/https://books.google.com/books?id=Ys8gGDZQHQ4C |url-status=live}}</ref> not so much based on the difficulty of orally preserving the Vedic hymns, but on the basis that it is highly unlikely that Panini's grammar was composed. [[Johannes Bronkhorst]] (2002) takes the intermediate position that the oral transmission of the Vedic hymns may well have been achieved orally, but that the development of Panini's grammar presupposes writing (consistent with a development of Indian writing in c. the 4th century BCE).<ref name="bronkhorst2002lar">"Falk goes too far. It is fair to expect that we believe that Vedic memorisation – though without parallel in any other human society – has been able to preserve very long texts for many centuries without losing a syllable.... However, the oral composition of a work as complex as Pāṇini's grammar is not only without parallel in other human cultures, it is without parallel in India itself.... It just will not do to state that our difficulty in conceiving any such thing is our problem." {{cite journal|last1=Bronkhorst|first1=Johannes|title=Literacy and Rationality in Ancient India|journal=Asiatische Studien/Études Asiatiques|date=2002|volume=56|issue=4|pages=803–804, 797–831}}</ref>