After hundreds of years of text composition and accumulation, from the RigVeda down to the Upaniṣads and the oldest Sūtras (c. 1200-500BCE), the actual process of canonization remains somewhat unclear,just as the exact time and place where this took place. While the texts of the grammarians Pāṇini (350 BCE?) and Patañjali (150 BCE) provide some inkling of the end of the canonization process, Pāṇini’s date remains uncertain and Patañjali’s (c. 150 BCE) is too late. As is well known, all these texts, Pāṇini’s included, were oral texts. In fact, script did not exist nor was it used in India proper before Asoka. Apart from the so-called Indus script, which rather seems a system of signs not directly tied to spoken language(s), writing in India proper begins with the rock and pillar inscriptions of great Emperor Asoka, in mid-third century BcE. It emerges with a fully developed quasi alphabetical Brahmī script that can be traced back, by and large, to the Kharoṣṭhī and Aramaic scripts, as used in the Persian empire. A new script, such as Kharoṣṭhī or Brahmī do not necessarily derive from a long period of development, which is clearly seen in the contemporaneous effort of King Darius (or his court, in 519 BCE) of creating an “Aryan”script that is vaguely based on Akkadian/Elamite cuneiform, but much simplified. The emergence of Kharoṣṭḥī follows a similar track, as will be discussed later. indusheritagecenter/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Gandhara-and-formation-of-Vedic-and-Zorastrian-canons-michael-witzel.pdf
Posted on: Sat, 28 Sep 2013 19:01:31 +0000