Although writing had developed in the Indus Civilisation around 2500 BC, the earliest examples of writing in India are the inscriptions of the Mauryan dynasty. Mauryan writing is based on the systems first used in western Asia, which were probably brought to the region by traders crossing the Indian Ocean to Arabia and Persia from at least 700 BC. The script, known today as ‘Brahmi’, is uniform across a wide area – from Shabazgarhi in northern Pakistan to Brahmagiri in the Deccan. This suggests that it was an innovation of the royal court, developed for the administrative needs of a far-flung empire.

The surviving inscriptions include fourteen royal edicts, three local edicts and four addresses to the Buddhist community. Frequently the same text was used in several locations, indicating that proclamations were prepared centrally and distributed to the provincial centres.

Brahmi continued to be used after the Mauryan dynasty and formed the basis for all later systems of writing in South Asia, South East Asia and Tibet. The language of early inscriptions is in a variety of early dialects known as Prakrit. These dialects represent the ordinary speech of the day, as opposed to classical Sanskrit which was used for orthodox religious texts.