The Alphabet of Angkor: A Guide to the Khmer Script

The Alphabet of Angkor: A Guide to the Khmer Script

Chapter One: The River of Letters: The Origin of the Khmer Script from Indian Brahmi The Khmer script, with its graceful curls and complex system of layered characters, is one of the most beautiful and visually intricate writing systems in Southeast Asia. It is the vessel that has carried the history, the poetry, and the sacred texts of the Khmer people for well over a millennium. But the origins of this unique alphabet do not lie within Cambodia itself. Its story begins far across the sea, in ancient India. The Khmer script is a direct descendant of the Brahmi script of India, a brilliant and scientific system of writing that was carried to the shores of Southeast Asia on the winds of trade and faith, where it was masterfully adapted by Khmer scholars to give a written voice to their own native tongue. The Great Ancestor: The Brahmi Script The ultimate ancestor of almost every native script in South and Southeast Asia, from the Devanagari of Hindi to the alphabets of Thai, Lao, Burmese,…