Nāgarī script

Bodhisattva statue with 1st-century Brahmi script (first three lines) and 9th-century Nagari script (last line). The Nāgarī script or Early Nagari is the ancestor of Devanagari, Nandinagari and other variants, and was first used to write Prakrit and Sanskrit. The term is sometimes used as a synonym for Devanagari script. It came in vogue during the first millennium CE. The Nāgarī script has roots in the ancient Brahmi script family. The Nāgarī script was in regular use by 7th century CE, and had fully evolved into Devanagari and Nandinagari scripts by about the end of first millennium of the common era.

Bodhisattva statue with 1st-century Brahmi script (first three lines) and 9th-century Nagari script (last line). ]] The Nāgarī script or Early Nagari is the ancestor of Devanagari, Nandinagari and other variants, and was first used to write Prakrit and Sanskrit. The term is sometimes used as a synonym for Devanagari script. It came in vogue during the first millennium CE. The Nāgarī script has roots in the ancient Brahmi script family. The Nāgarī script was in regular use by 7th century CE, and had fully evolved into Devanagari and Nandinagari scripts by about the end of first millennium of the common era.

Etymology

Nagari is a vṛddhi derivation from नगर ( ), which means city.

Usage outside India

Inscriptions in early forms of the Nagari script are also found outside of India, in Sri Lanka, Burma and Indonesia. The Belanjong pillar found on Bali, features a 10th century Nagari inscription. Although the Kawi script was the dominant script used in the great majority of inscriptions on Java, a small number of Sanskrit inscriptions in the south-central regions of the island are written in the Early Nāgarī script. The earliest inscriptions found in Early Nāgarī are from around the 10th century CE, with many more between the 11th and 14th centuries. Some of the old-Devanāgarī inscriptions are found in Hindu temples of Java, such as the Prambanan temple. The Ligor and the Kalasan inscriptions of central Java, dated to the 8th century, are also in the Nāgarī script of north India. According to the epigraphist and Asian Studies scholar Lawrence Briggs, these may be related to the 9th century copper plate inscription of Devapaladeva (Bengal) which is also in early Devanāgarī script. The term kawi in Kawi script is a loan word from (poetry). According to anthropologists and Asian studies scholars John Norman Miksic and Goh Geok Yian, the 8th-century version of early Nāgarī or Devanāgarī script was adopted in Java, Bali, and Khmer around the 8th–9th centuries, as evidenced by the many contemporaneous inscriptions of this period. The 7th century Tibetan king Songtsen Gampo ordered that all foreign books be transcribed into the Tibetan language, and sent his ambassador Tonmi Sambota to India to acquire alphabetic and writing methods, who returned with a Sanskrit Nāgarī script from Kashmir corresponding to twenty-four (24) Tibetan sounds and innovating new symbols for six (6) local sounds. The museum in Mrauk-u (Mrohaung) in the Rakhine state of Myanmar held in 1972 two examples of Nāgarī script. Archaeologist Aung Thaw describes these inscriptions, associated with the Chandra, or Candra, dynasty that first hailed from the ancient Indian city of Vesáli: File:Copper plates NMND-1.JPG|Coppern plates in Nāgarī script, 1035 CE File:Nagari Script 01.jpg|Nagari Script 01 File:Nagari Script 02.jpg|Nagari Script 02

See also

Nandinagari Sylheti Nagri Eastern Nagari Lipi

References

Bibliography

Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1376335901 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.