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James Prinsep FRS (20 August 1799 – 22 April 1840) was an English scholar, orientalist and antiquary. He was the founding editor of the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal and is best remembered for deciphering the Kharosthi and Dhammalipi scripts of ancient India.
Aug 19, 2019 · In addition to deciphering Brahmi, Prinsep also deciphered the ‘Kharosthi’ script, an ancient script used in the North-Western regions of India to write Sanskrit and Prakrit. For this, he used the coins of the Indo-Greek kings that had ruled Punjab.
- Akshay Chavan
It is the story of an Englishman named James Prinsep, who was determined to read what these ancient inscriptions said. And this is the story of the decoding of Brahmi – the oldest readable Indian script and the mother script of most modern Indian scripts.
Norwegian scholar Christian Lassen used the bilingual Greek-Brahmi coinage of Indo-Greek king Agathocles to correctly achieve in 1836 the first secure decipherment of several letters of the Brahmi script, which was later completed by James Prinsep.
- No
- 𑀓
- 𑀘
- Voiceless
- Prinsep The Engineer
- The Code Breaker
- Age of Reason
Prinsep travelled by boat from Calcutta to Benares in October 1820. He had been hired by the East India Company to assist the Assay Master of the Mint in testing the proportion and quality of metals used in new coins. Barely out of his teens, he considered himself a man of science, having studied architecture and chemistry in London. His most famou...
In Calcutta, Prinsep took over as editor of the Journal of the Asiatic Society, and solicited contributions from across British territories, which now covered much of the subcontinent. It took one massive empire to unearth another. Scholars had noticed that there were similar – in some cases identical – inscriptions on pillars and rocks in widely s...
Prinsep’s achievements stand as monuments to the Age of Reason. However, since that Age went hand in hand with the Age of Imperialism, and a lot of racist and sexist tracts were composed in the name of reason and science, the entire enterprise of 19th century European knowledge-gathering has come to be disputed. The most influential piece of critic...
Jan 4, 2023 · James Prinsep was an English scholar best known for his work on deciphering the ancient Brahmi script in India. It is because of him that India learnt about Emperor Ashoka, one of the country’s greatest rulers.
A 2000-year-old Indian script was decoded and a fascinating new chapter was added to Indian history. India learnt about Emperor Ashoka, one of the greatest k...
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