About Indo-Bactrian writing

How unfortunate that we can take in only so much when visiting places or exhibitions. I often regret that I did not look further into certain details, and one of these missed elements is the Indo-Bactrian script. I have seen plenty of such documents at exhibitions about the Silk Road and at the Musée Guimet in Paris, but I merely glanced at them without any mental connection to their writing or tenure. Well, I should have because, after all, the Bactrian Empire is a heritage of Alexander’s conquest of Central Asia.

Time to catch up!

The other day, I came across an article about the Kharosthi script, another name for the Indo-Bactrian writing that originated in the aftermath of Alexander during the 4^th and 3^rd century BC in what is now Pakistan. This Kharosthi was a form of Prakrit, an Indo-Aryan language that was used two generations after Alexander by King Asoka for his pillar inscriptions (see: When pillars with unknown writing were discovered in India).

[Kharosthi script on a wooden plate, National Museum of New Delhi]

For good order, we have to go back to the Achaemenid kings who, in the early 5^th century BC, introduced Aramaic, their official language, to their newly conquered territories in Gandhara and along the Indus. They wrote their Aramaic using a North Semitic script which was customized to suit the phonetics of Gandhara, a Prakrit dialect, and this resulted in the creation of Kharosthi. Kharosthi writing was also used for most inscriptions in northwestern India between 220 BC and 200 AD. At the very heart of Central Asia, Sogdiana and Bactria generally used the Kharosthi inscriptions in the days of the Kushan Empire (1^st-4^th century AD). Because of the flourishing trading along the Silk Road, Kharosthi writing is found all over Central Asia, particularly during Shanshan rule (starting during the 1^st century BC), while further examples have been found more to the east in China during the reign of Emperor Ling (168-189 AD).

Kharosthi was not only used for inscriptions or written documents but also stamped on coins during the short-lived Indo-Greek Kingdom when bilingual texts were frequent. A few rare examples showed Kharosthi on pottery found as far as Bengal.

Eventually, and due to the increased influence of the Brahmi script, Kharosthi gradually was confined to specific regions till, by the 4^th century AD, it disappeared entirely.