Tamil Brahmi Script Found in Egypt

Tamil Brahmi Script Found in Egypt

A broken storage jar with inscriptions in an ancient form of Tamil script, dated to the first century BCE., has been excavated in Egypt.

Dr. Roberta Tomber, a pottery specialist at the British Museum, London, identified the fragmentary vessel as a storage jar made in India. Iravatham Mahadevan, a specialist in Tamil epigraphy, has confirmed that the inscription on the jar is in Tamil written in the Tamil Brahmi script of about the first century.

Earlier excavations at this site about 30 years ago yielded two pottery inscriptions in Tamil Brahmi from the same era. Additionally, a pottery inscription was found in 1995 at Berenike, a Roman settlement of the Red Sea coast of Egypt. These discoveries proved material evidence to corroborate the literary accounts by classical Western authors and the Tamil Sangam poets about the flourishing trade between the India and Rome, via the Red Sea ports, in the early centuries CE.