Which one of the following statements is correct?

Correct — A, Brahmi, used for writing many Ashokan inscriptions, shows local variations. Ashoka's edicts were cut by local masons at sites spread from Kandahar to Karnataka, and they vary at three levels. The language varies: the Prakrit of the north-western edicts is close to Gandhari, while the eastern edicts of the Magadhan heartland use a dialect near Old Ardhamagadhi. The script varies with it — the north-west used Kharoshthi and, on the Afghan frontier, Greek and Aramaic, while the rest of the empire used Brahmi. Within Brahmi itself the letter shapes cut in the west at Girnar are not identical to those cut in the east at Dhauli and Jaugada or in the newly won south. That divergence is not a curiosity; it is the reason the script split into a northern line that led through the Gupta script to Nagari and a southern line that produced the Kannada, Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam alphabets.

• (b)The system of hieroglyphic writing was developed in ancient Mesopotamia. — Hieroglyphs are Egyptian. Mesopotamia's script was cuneiform. The option has swapped the two river valleys, which is the single most common slip in this topic.
• (c)The system of cuneiform writing developed around 3rd millennium BCE in Egypt. — Wrong on both counts. Cuneiform was developed for Sumerian in southern Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq, and its beginnings lie in the late fourth millennium BCE rather than the third.
• (d)An ancient script, Kharoshthi was widely used in the southern part of India. — Kharoshthi belongs to the north-west — eastern Afghanistan and the Gandhara country of northern Pakistan — and it runs right to left, following its Aramaic parent. No southern Indian inscription tradition uses it.

India has two ancient scripts of its own attested in the Ashokan period. Brahmi runs left to right, was used across almost the whole empire, and is the ancestor of nearly every Indian script in use today as well as of scripts in Tibet and South-East Asia. Kharoshthi runs right to left, is confined to the north-west, and died out by about the third century CE leaving no descendants. Both are separate from the two great West Asian systems the option list drags in: cuneiform, wedge-shaped marks pressed into clay for Sumerian in Mesopotamia, and hieroglyphs, the pictorial script of Egypt.

Three of the four statements can be judged without knowing anything about India, because they are claims about where a foreign script was born. Sort those first — hieroglyphs to Egypt, cuneiform to Mesopotamia — and (b) and (c) fall together. Then (d) asks whether Kharoshthi was a southern script, and the giveaway is its right-to-left direction, borrowed from Aramaic, the chancery script of the Achaemenid empire whose eastern edge touched the Indus. A script picked up from Persia is not going to be the everyday hand of the far south. What is left is (a), and it is also independently true. Brahmi went unread for centuries until James Prinsep worked it out in the 1830s, and the regional differences he had to negotiate are the very local variations this option describes.

• Ashoka's inscriptions use four scripts — Brahmi, Kharoshthi, Greek and Aramaic — across three languages.
• The bilingual Greek and Aramaic edict from Kandahar marks the western limit of Ashoka's inscribed empire.
• Kharoshthi is written right to left and is derived from Aramaic; Brahmi is written left to right.
• James Prinsep deciphered Brahmi in the 1830s, which is what made the edicts readable and identified Piyadassi as Ashoka.
• Cuneiform began in Sumer in the late fourth millennium BCE; Egyptian hieroglyphs appear a little afterwards.

• Exchanging hieroglyphs and cuneiform between Egypt and Mesopotamia.
• Assuming one empire meant one script — Ashoka used four, chosen to suit the region.
• Placing Kharoshthi in the south because it is old and Indian; it is a north-western script with an Aramaic parent.

Asked as a single-correct-statement item where three options are foreign-script geography and the fourth is the Indian fact being tested.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following pairs is correctly matched?

  • (a)Cuneiform — Egypt
  • (b)Hieroglyphs — Mesopotamia
  • (c)Kharoshthi — north-western India
  • (d)Brahmi — right-to-left script

  Answer(c) Kharoshthi — north-western India — cuneiform belongs to Mesopotamia, hieroglyphs to Egypt, and Brahmi runs left to right.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Ashokan edict found at Kandahar in Afghanistan is written in

  • (a)Brahmi and Kharoshthi
  • (b)Greek and Aramaic
  • (c)Prakrit and Pali
  • (d)Sanskrit and Persian

  Answer(b) Greek and Aramaic — the western edge of Ashoka's empire lay in territory long ruled from Persia and settled by Greeks, so the edict was cut in the languages people there could read.