The script written on Ashoka's Pillars is

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — D, Brahmi. Ashoka's pillar edicts are engraved in the Brahmi script, and their language is Prakrit — specifically the Magadhi Prakrit of the imperial chancery at Pataliputra. Keeping script and language apart is the entire question, and it is the distinction two of the four options are designed to blur. A script is a system of written signs; a language is what those signs record. Brahmi is a script, written from left to right, and it is the ancestor of almost every writing system used in India today as well as of the Sinhala, Burmese, Thai and Tibetan scripts. Prakrit is the language, and Prakrit written in Brahmi is what stands on the pillars. Ashoka did use other scripts, but only on the fringes of his empire and never on the pillars of the Indian heartland: the rock edicts at Shahbazgarhi and Mansehra in the north-west are in Kharoshthi, which runs right to left, and the Kandahar edicts are in Greek and Aramaic for the Hellenised and Persian populations of the far west. The pillars themselves are a distinct class of Ashokan monument — single shafts of polished sandstone quarried at Chunar near Varanasi, generally twelve to fifteen metres tall and weighing tens of tonnes, transported hundreds of kilometres and set up without any joint or foundation, each crowned by an animal capital. Bihar carries more of them than any other State: the pillars at Lauriya Nandangarh and Lauriya Areraj in Champaran, at Rampurva, and the lion pillar at Kolhua near Vaishali all still stand. The script on all of them stayed unread for nearly two thousand years until James Prinsep deciphered Brahmi in 1837, and with it recovered an emperor whose name Indian tradition had forgotten.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The trap the question is built around, and the answer most candidates give. Pali is a LANGUAGE, not a script — the Middle Indo-Aryan language in which the Buddhist Tipitaka is preserved, and it has been written in Brahmi, Sinhala, Burmese, Thai, Khmer and Roman letters at different times and places. Ashoka's edicts are not even in Pali; they are in regional Prakrits closely related to it.  (b) Also a language rather than a script, and the wrong language as well. The Mauryan chancery deliberately used Prakrit, the spoken vernacular, rather than Sanskrit, the language of learning — a choice that made the edicts intelligible to ordinary subjects. The earliest substantial royal inscription in Sanskrit comes centuries later, with Rudradaman's Junagadh rock inscription of about 150 CE.  (c) The only genuine script on the list apart from Brahmi, and it belongs to a different world entirely. The Samaritan script is a West Semitic writing system descended from the Palaeo-Hebrew alphabet and used in Palestine; it has no Indian connection whatever. It is on the paper to give the option set a fourth entry, and can be struck out on sight.

Concept: Ashoka's inscriptions fall into three groups and it is worth holding them apart. The MAJOR ROCK EDICTS, fourteen in number, are cut on natural rock faces around the frontiers of the empire — Girnar, Dhauli, Jaugada, Kalsi, Shahbazgarhi, Mansehra, Sopara, Yerragudi. The PILLAR EDICTS, seven in number, are engraved on the free-standing monolithic columns of the Gangetic heartland. Alongside these are the MINOR rock and pillar edicts, including the Maski and Gujarra inscriptions — the ones that give Ashoka's personal name rather than only his titles Devanampiya Piyadasi — and the Rummindei pillar at Lumbini recording his visit to the Buddha's birthplace and his reduction of that village's tax to one-eighth. What the edicts communicate is dhamma: non-violence, respect for elders and teachers, truthfulness, tolerance between sects, care for animals and provision of wells, rest houses and medical care for men and beasts. They are administrative proclamations, not scripture, and they were placed where people passed — on trade routes, near towns and at pilgrimage sites.

State PCS 2025 Q25 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q25 — History PYQ with Answer