History of Indic Scripts

The present study offers an introductory survey on the history of Indic scripts. It was prepared in the frame of the E-QUAL project, and it provided the narrative structure on which a Moodle module on the same topic was built by the present author. Basically, it focuses on the developments of the Indic scripts, from the time of their earliest available attestations up to the time when the major present-day (modern) scripts reached their current form. The study is organized in six chapters. The first chapter has a prefatory character, in that it offers a general contextualization of what will be covered in the following sections of the work: the general plan of the work is outlined, the basic concepts are defined, and the major phenomena connected with the history of the Indic scripts are presented. In chapters two through six, a chronological account of the development of the Indic scripts is given, from their earliest attestations up to their current form. Chapter six is followed by three additional sections (Appendices), each focusing on a specific topic, i.e. the languages used in Indian inscriptions, the Siddhamātṛkā script, and the typological classification of the Indic scripts.