1200 years ancient buddhist writings

Hi , wonder if anyone can recognise below writings ?

Can you give a description of what the context of the photo is?

Hi , i have just found the info , it is in Pallava .
The site found is a buddhist temple at Kedah Malaysia , should be from the period of the Srivijaya Empire .

Pls refer to below link .

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The origins and evolution of writing scripts and languages have fascinated me. There has been a lot more cross-pollination across cultures and countries through language and writing, than most of us realise.

The Pallava script itself died out centuries ago, but its influence on other writing systems and languages goes deep. The script originated in South India during the period of the Pallava empire. From there, it went around parts of India, and onwards to Southeast Asia, evolving into and/or influencing the Cambodian Khmer, Thai, and several other languages and writing systems around Southeast Asia.
http://www.skyknowledge.com/pallava.htm

Interestingly, the Pallava system had a significantly larger character set than the Tamil language which it evolved into later and became prevalent in the same region.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20072045

You could use the Pallava character set to write out very precise pronunciations - you read and speak the word as it is written. Tamil, in contrast, has a more compact character set, leaving out some of the consonant sounds - i.e., you need to know how the word is pronounced and can’t just read the characters to make the sounds.

I can see how the Pallava characters can be used to write out Pāli texts, since there’s not much ambiguity in pronunciation. With the exception of the ⟨ḷ⟩ or ⟨ḷa⟩, the Pallava script has a few more sounds than are used in Pāli. Therefore it would have been quite straightforward to write out Buddhist texts in Pāli using the Pallava scripts without much loss of pronunciation detail.

It’s so interesting that we’re continuing to find new (ancient!) treasures in my neighbouring country :slight_smile: far away from its land of origin.

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