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eBook details

• Title: Did Hellenistic Kings Send Letters to Asoka?(Critical Essay)
• Author : The Journal of the American Oriental Society
• Release Date : January 01, 2010
• Genre: Social Science,Books,Nonfiction,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 191 KB

Description

As soon as script was introduced in India the art of writing letters may have been practiced. If it was, this is not known directly from any surviving correspondence of the third century B.C., of course. Nor are letters mentioned in early literature before Kautalya, who, in his "Chapter on royal orders" (sasanadhikara II 10) describes at an uncertain date how official letters are to be written. Only by the middle of the first millennium A.D. letters are mentioned occasionally in Sanskrit dramas, mostly in passing, and in Buddhist literature, frequently, particularly in the Jatakas. (1) Only one drama, the Mudraraksasa (V 9/10), is more explicit: one of Raksasa's letters is intercepted and opened secretly "without violating the seal." (2) Luckily, the beginning of the letter is read out (vacitah): svasti yathasthanam kuto 'pi ko' pi kam api purusavisesam avagamayati "Well-being! According to the right order; from somewhere somebody informs some high-ranking personality." After this summary of the address the content proper begins. This paragraph provides some vague ideas about the form of an ancient Indian letter, but only of the beginning. For, unfortunately, the end of the letter is not quoted. Epistolary literature from India, on the other hand, such as the Lekhapaddhati, begins only almost a millennium later. (3)

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