The Kharoṣṭhī script, also known as the Gāndhārī script, is an ancient alphabetic script used by the Gandhara culture of historic northwest India to write the Gandhari and Sanskrit languages (the Gandhara kingdom was located along the present-day border between Afghanistan and Pakistan between the Indus River and the Khyber Pass). It was in use from the middle of the 3rd century BC until it died out in its homeland around the 3rd century AD. It was also in use along the Silk Road where there is some evidence it may have survived until the 7th century in the remote way stations of Khotan and Niya. Technical note: Due to technical limitations, some web browsers may not display some special characters in this article. ... The Phoenician alphabet dates from around 1000 BC and is derived from the Proto-Canaanite alphabet. ... Note: This article contains special characters. ... 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The Soyombo script (from Sanskrit: svayambhu self-existent) was a syllabic script for Mongolian, created by Ondur Gegeen (the first Jebtsundamba Khutughtu) in 1686. ... Note: This page contains phonetic information presented in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) using Unicode. ... Telugu script, an abugida from the Brahmic family of scripts, is used to write the Telugu language. ... The Tibetan script was created in the mid-7th century, by Thonmi Sambhota, a Tibetan official, with the assistance of some Indian Buddhist monks. ... Proto-Indo-European Indo-European studies Tocharian is one of the most obscure branches of the Indo-European language group. ... 11th century book in Syriac Serto. ... The Sogdian alphabet is derived from Syriac, the descendant script of Aramaic alphabet. ... The Uyghur alphabet is any of the following: A descendant of the Sogdian alphabet, used for texts of Buddhist, Manichæan and Christian contents for 700–800 years in East Turkestan. ... The Manchu Alphabet was used for recording the Manchu language. ... The Nabatean alphabet is a consonantal alphabet (abjad) that was used by the Nabateans in the 2nd century BC. Important inscriptions are found in Petra. ... The Arabic alphabet is the script used for writing the Arabic language, which is the language of the Quran, the holy book of Islam. ... Pahlavi is a term that refers: (1) to a script used in Iran derived from the Aramaic script, and (2) more broadly, to Middle Persian, the Middle Iranian language written in this script. ... Coptic letters in a florid Bohairic script The Coptic alphabet is an alphabet used for writing the Coptic language. ... This article is about the 4th century alphabet of the Gothic bible. ... Tablet inscribed with the Glagolitic alphabet The Glagolitic alphabet or Glagolitsa is the oldest known Slavonic alphabet. ... The Cyrillic alphabet (or azbuka, from the old name of the first letters) is an alphabet used to write six natural Slavic languages ( Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian, and Ukrainian) and many other languages of the former Soviet Union, Asia and Eastern Europe. ... Old Italic refers to a number of related historical alphabets used on the Italian peninsula which were used for some non-Indo-European languages (Etruscan and probably North Picene), various Indo-European languages belonging to the Italic branch (Faliscan and members of the Sabellian group, including Oscan, Umbrian, and South... The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world, the standard script of the English language and most of the languages of western and central Europe, and of those areas settled by Europeans. ... 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Buddhas First Sermon at Sarnath, Kushan Period, ca. ... The word Gāndhārī can mean more than one thing: Gāndhārī is a character in the Indian epic, the Mahabharata. ... The Sanskrit language ( संस्कृता वाक्) is one of the earliest attested members of the Indo-European language family and is not only a classical language, but also an official language of India. ... Buddhas First Sermon at Sarnath, Kushan Period, ca. ... The Indus (सिन्‍धु नदी) (known as Sindhu in ancient times) is the principal river of Pakistan. ... The Khyber Pass (also called the Khaiber Pass in old documents) is the most important pass connecting Pakistan with Afghanistan. ... (4th century BC - 3rd century BC - 2nd century BC - other centuries) (2nd millennium BC - 1st millennium BC - 1st millennium AD) Events The first two Punic Wars between Carthage and Rome over dominance in western Mediterranean Rome conquers Spain Great Wall of China begun Indian traders regularly visited Arabia Scythians occupy... (2nd century - 3rd century - 4th century - other centuries) Events The Sassanid dynasty of Persia launches a war to reconquer lost lands in the Roman east. ... Articles related to The Great Silk Road. ... ( 6th century - 7th century - 8th century - other centuries) Events Islam starts in Arabia, the Quran is written, and Arabs subjugate Syria, Iraq, Persia, Egypt, North Africa and Central Asia to Islam. ... Khotan is an oasis town and a prefecture in the Taklamakan desert that was part of the southern silk road. ... Niya is a site on the southern edge of the Tarim Basin, in modern-day Xinjiang, China at which numerous Buddhist scriptures were recovered. ...

Scholars are not in agreement as to whether the Kharoṣṭhī script evolved gradually, or was the work of a mindful inventor. An analysis of the script forms shows a clear dependency on the Aramaic alphabet but with extensive modifications to support the sounds found in Indic languages. One model is that the Aramaic script arrived with the Achaemenid conquest of the region in 500 BC and evolved over the next 200+ years to reach its final form by the 3rd century BC. However, no intermediate forms have yet been found to confirm this evolutionary model, and rock and coins inscriptions from the 3rd century BC onward show a unified and mature form. Aramaic was for a long time (between the later Assyrian empire and the Abbasid Caliphate) a lingua franca in the Middle East; its alphabet, though itself derived from the Phoenician alphabet, therefore superseded the Old Hebrew alphabet that had been independently descended from the Phoenician alphabet. ... Achaemenid Empire The Achaemenid Dynasty was a dynasty in the ancient Persian Empire, including Cyrus II the Great, Darius I and Xerxes I. At the height of their power, the Achaemenid rulers of Persia ruled over territories roughly emcompassing some parts of todays Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon... Centuries: 7th century BC - 6th century BC - 5th century BC Decades: 550s BC - 540s BC - 530s BC - 520s BC - 510s BC - 500s BC - 490s BC - 480s BC - 470s BC - 460s BC - 450s BC Events and Trends 509 BC - Foundation of the Roman Republic 508 BC - Office of pontifex maximus created... (4th century BC - 3rd century BC - 2nd century BC - other centuries) (2nd millennium BC - 1st millennium BC - 1st millennium AD) Events The first two Punic Wars between Carthage and Rome over dominance in western Mediterranean Rome conquers Spain Great Wall of China begun Indian traders regularly visited Arabia Scythians occupy...

The study of the Kharoṣṭhī script was recently invigorated by the discovery of the Gandharan Buddhist Texts, a set of birch-bark manuscripts written in Kharoṣṭhī, discovered near the Afghanistan city of Hadda just west of the Khyber Pass. The manuscripts were donated to the British Library in 1994. The entire set of manuscripts are dated to the 1st century AD making them the oldest Buddhist manuscripts in existence. The Gandhāran Buddhist Texts are the earliest Buddhist manuscripts yet discovered, and indeed the earliest Indian manuscripts yet discovered. ... Head of the Buddha, Hadda, 1st-2nd century CE Hadda is a Greco-Buddhist archeological site located in the ancient area of Gandhara, inside the Khyber Pass, six miles south of the city of Jalalabad in todays eastern Afghanistan. ... British Library main building, London The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and one of the worlds largest research libraries, holding over 150 million items and adding some 3 million every year. ... 1994 was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International year of the Family. ... (1st century BC - 1st century - 2nd century - other centuries) The 1st century was that century which lasted from 1 to 99. ... Statues of Buddha such as this, the Tian Tan Buddha statue in Hong Kong, remind followers to practice right living. ...

Kharoṣṭhī will be encoded in the Unicode range U+10A00—U+10A5F, starting in version 4.1.0.

External links

• information on the Kharoṣṭhī alphabet by Omniglot (http://www.omniglot.com/writing/kharosthi.htm)
• A Preliminary Study of Kharoṣṭhī Manuscript Paleography (http://depts.washington.edu/ebmp/downloads/Glass_2000.pdf) by Andrew Glass, University of Washington (2000)