Dhaṃmalipi, Not Brāhmī? The Script Question in Aśoka's Edicts:  A Re-Examination of the Girnar Texts “iyaṃ dhaṃmalipi”

RAJIV AMBADAS SHINDE

Dhaṃmalipi, Not Brāhmī? The Script Question in Aśoka's Edicts: A Re-Examination of the Girnar Texts “iyaṃ dhaṃmalipi”

Author(s)	Mr. RAJIV AMBADAS SHINDE
Country	India
Abstract	The writing system of the emperor Aśoka's (c. 268–232 BCE) edicts is universally referred to in modern scholarship as the Brāhmī script (Singh, 2020). Yet the word "Brāhmī" nowhere occurs in the king's own inscriptions. The only term the edicts use for their own written form is dhaṃma-lipi and dhaṃma-dipi (northwestern versions) — "the Dhaṃma-writing" — together with the derived words lipikara and dipikara, "scribe" (Baums, 2022). This paper re-analyses all classes of Aśokan edicts — the Major Rock Edicts, Minor Rock Edicts, Pillar Edicts, and the Greek and Aramaic versions — with special attention to the Girnar corpus, where the king's phrase iyaṃ dhaṃmalipi ("this Dhaṃmalipi"), popularly transcribed iyaṃ Dhammalipi, occurs at the close of the Fourth Rock Edict. It then traces the history of the name "Brāhmī" to the nineteenth-century decipherment tradition and to later Sanskritic script lists, and surveys philological scholarship worldwide bearing on the term lipi. The paper concludes that while the letter-forms are paleographically identical with what epigraphy classifies as Brāhmī, the first-person, inscriptional evidence supports the view that Aśoka's own name for his writing was Dhaṃmalipi, and that the continued exclusive use of "Brāhmī" rests on scholarly convention rather than on anything the edicts themselves say.
Keywords	dhaṃma-lipi, Brāhmī script, iyaṃ dhaṃmalipi, Aśokan edicts, Girnar edicts, Lipiśālāsaṃdarśanaparivarta, Iranian loanword, Panini, Jain Agamas, lipi-kara, dipi-kara
Field	Sociology > Archaeology / History
Published In	Volume 8, Issue 4, July-August 2026
Published On	2026-08-21

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Dhaṃmalipi, Not Brāhmī? The Script Question in Aśoka's Edicts: A Re-Examination of the Girnar Texts “iyaṃ dhaṃmalipi”

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