146. The Spread Eastward: the Writing of India
The diffusion of the alphabet eastward from its point of origin was even greater than its spread through Europe. Most of this extension in Asia is comprised in two great streams. One of these followed the southern edge of the continent. This was a movement that began some centuries before Christ, and often followed water routes. The second flow was mainly post-Christian and affected chiefly the inland peoples of central Asia.
India is the country of most importance in the development of the south Asiatic alphabets. The forms of the Sanskrit letters show that they and the subsequent Hindu alphabets are derivatives, though much altered ones, from the primitive Semitic writing. Exactly how the alphabet was carried from the shore of the Mediterranean to India has not been fully determined. By some the prototype of the principal earliest Indian form of writing is thought to have been the alphabet of the south Arabian Sabæans or Himyarites of five or six hundred years B.C. As the Arabs were Semites, and as there was a certain amount of commerce up and down the Red Sea, it is not surprising that even these rather remote and backward people had taken up writing. Between south Arabia and India there was also some intercourse, so that a further transmission by sea seems possible enough. Another view is that Hindu traders learned and imported a north Semitic alphabet perhaps as early as during the seventh century, from which the Brahmi was made over, from which in turn all living Indian alphabets are derived. Besides this main importation, there was another, from Aramæan sources, which gave rise to a different form of Hindu writing, the Kharoshthi or Indo-Bactrian of the Punjab, which spread for a time into Turkistan but soon died out in India.