Brahmi Alphabet

Origin

The Brahmi alphabet is the ancestor of most of the 40 or so modern Indian alphabets, and of a number of other alphabets, such as Khmer and Tibetan. It is thought to have been modelled on the Aramaic or Phoenician alphabets, and appeared in India sometime before 500 BC. Another theory is that Brahmi developed from the Indus or Harappa script, which was used in the Indus valley until about 2,000 BC.

The earliest known inscriptions in the Brahmi alphabet are those of King Asoka (c.270-232 BC), third monarch of the Mauryan dynasty.

Brahmi was used to write a variety of languages, including Sanskrit and Prakrit.

Notable features

The structure of the Brahmi alphabet is similar to that of modern Indian alphabets: each letters represents a consonant with a inherent vowels /a/. Other vowels were indicated using a variety of diacritics and separate letters.
Letters are grouped according to the way they are pronounced.
Many letters have more than one form.

Consonants

The Brahmi Script

Vowels and vowel diacritics

Brahmi vowel diacritics

Descendants of Brahmi

The descendants of the Brahmi alphabet include: Bengali, Devanāgarī, Gujarāti, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Khmer, Malayalam, Oriya, Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu, Tibetan

Links

Free Brahmi font
http://www.jwajalapa.com/lipi/download.php

The Edicts of King Asoka
http://www.cs.colostate.edu/~malaiya/ashoka.html

Comparative table of many Brahmi-derived scripts
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Academy/9594/brahmi.html

ALPHABETUM is a Unicode font specifically designed for ancient languages that includes Brahmi, and many other ancient scripts
http://guindo.pntic.mec.es/~jmag0042/alphabet.html

Other syllabic alphabets

Ahom, Balinese, Batak, Bengali, Brahmi, Buhid, Burmese, Cham, Dehong Dai, Devanagari, Ethiopic, Grantha, Gujarati, Gurmukhi (Punjabi), Hanuno'o, Hmong, Javanese, Kannada, Kharosthi, Khmer, Lanna, Lao, Lepcha, Limbu, Lontara/Makasar, Malayalam, Manpuri, Modi, New Tai Lue, Oriya, Phags-pa, Ranjana, Redjang, Sharda, Siddham, Sinhala, Sorang Sompeng, Sourashtra, Soyombo, Syloti Nagri, Tagalog, Tagbanwa, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Tibetan, Tocharian, Varang Kshiti