Vellaveli Brahmi Inscription is a rock-cut record on rocks in Thalavai (Vellavely) of Batticaloa, Sri Lanka. The place located 50km away from Batticaloa through KaluvanchikudyA4 road. The place is surrounded by rocks and hills. There are about four inscriptions, and 3 out of 4 cannot readable or damaged due to natural impact. Some parts of rocks are carved by human activity, which could have happened in ancient days.[1] The initial finding says that it is dated to approximately 2200 years,[1] and it has mix of both Brahmi and Prakrit.[2]
Vellavely or Vellaveli or Vellaaveli is a town in the Batticaloa District of Sri Lanka, it is located about 30 km South of Batticaloa.
Batticaloa is a major city in the Eastern Province, Sri Lanka, and its former capital. It is the administrative capital of the Batticaloa District. The city is the seat of the Eastern University of Sri Lanka and is a major commercial city. It is on the east coast, 111 kilometres (69 mi) south of Trincomalee, and is situated on an island. Pasikudah is popular tourist destinations situated 35 km northwest with beaches and flat year-round warm-water shallow-lagoons.
Sri Lanka, officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, is an island country in South Asia, located in the Indian Ocean to the southwest of the Bay of Bengal and to the southeast of the Arabian Sea. The island is historically and culturally intertwined with the Indian subcontinent, but is geographically separated from the Indian subcontinent by the Gulf of Mannar and the Palk Strait. The legislative capital, Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte, is a suburb of the commercial capital and largest city, Colombo.
The rough translation says “Ship caption Shamathaya, who has the title Parumaka, given this rock”. The word Parumaka literally means lord, and the word Naavika could be a sailboat as per use of Sangam literature’s[3] wording.
The Sangam literature is the ancient Tamil literature of the period in the history of south India spanning from c. 300 BCE to 300 CE. This collection contains 2381 poems in Tamil composed by 473 poets, some 102 of whom remain anonymous. Most of the available Sangam literature is from the Third Sangam, this period is known as the Sangam period, which refers to the prevalent Sangam legends claiming literary academies lasting thousands of years, giving the name to the corpus of literature. The Only religious poems among the shorter poems occur in paripaatal. The rest of the corpus of Sangam literature deals with human relationship and emotions.
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The Edicts of Ashoka are a collection of more than thirty inscriptions on the pillars as well as boulders and cave walls, made by Emperor Ashoka of the Mauryan Empire during his reign, from 268 BCE to 232 BCE. Ashoka used the expression Dhaṃma Lipi to describe his own Edicts. These inscriptions were dispersed throughout the areas of modern-day Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and provide the first tangible evidence of Buddhism. The edicts describe in detail Ashoka's view about dhamma, an earnest attempt to solve some of the problems that a complex society faced. According to the edicts, the extent of Buddhist proselytism during this period reached as far as the Mediterranean, and many Buddhist monuments were created.
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Tamil-Brahmi, or Tamili aka Tamizhi is a variant of the Brahmi script used to write the Tamil language. These are the earliest documents of a Dravidian language, and the script was well established in the Chera and Pandyan states, in what is now Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Sri Lanka. Inscriptions have been found on cave beds, pot sherds, Jar burials, coins, seals, and rings. The language is Archaic Tamil, and led to classical Sangam literature.
The earliest traces of epigraphy in the Indian Subcontinent are found in the undeciphered inscriptions of the Indus Valley Civilization, which date back to the early 3rd millennium BC. Two other important archeological classes of symbols are found from the 1st millennium BCE, Megalithic Graffiti Symbols and symbols on punch-marked coins, though most scholars do not consider these to constitute fully linguistic scripts, and their semiotic functions are not well understood. The earliest deciphered epigraphic inscriptions of significant length are the Edicts of Ashoka of the 3rd century BCE, written in forms of Prakrit in the Brahmi script. Samanam inscriptions in South India written in Tamil-Brahmi, Bhattiprolu alphabet and the Kadamba alphabet are also of relatively early date. Some Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions discovered at Palani, Erode, and Adichanallur, have been claimed to be as ancient as 500 BCE, but so far only the claimed pre-Ashokan inscriptions at Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka have been published academically.
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The Kadamba script marks the birth of a dedicated script for writing Kannada. It is a descendant of the Brahmi script, an abugida visually close to the Kalinga alphabet. The Kadamba script was developed during the reign of the Kadamba dynasty in the 4th–6th centuries. The Kadamba script is also known as Pre-Old-Kannada script. This script later became popular in what is today the state of Goa and was used to write Sanskrit, Kannada
The Bhattiprolu script is a variant of the Brahmi script which has been found in old inscriptions at Bhattiprolu, a small village in Guntur district, Andhra Pradesh, South India. It is located in the fertile Krishna river delta and the estuary region where the river meets the Bay of Bengal.
The Ashokan edicts in Delhi are a series of edicts on the teachings of Buddha created by Ashoka, the Mauryan Emperor who ruled in the Indian subcontinent during the 3rd century BC. The Edicts of Ashoka were either carved on in-situ rocks or engraved on pillars erected throughout the empire; examples of both are found in Delhi.
Tissamaharama Tamil Brahmi inscription refers to a fragment of black and red ware flat dish inscribed in Brahmi script excavated at the earliest layer in southern town of Tissamaharama in Sri Lanka. It is dated to approximately 200 BC by German scholars who undertook the excavation. The inscription is mix of Brahmi letters and Graffiti symbols.
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The number of stone inscriptions which have been found in Sri Lanka to date is over 4000. But these inscriptions are of different types. Considering their locations and their appearances, for the ease of studying, they are classified as follows:
↑ கண்ணகி 'மாநாய்கன் குலக்கொம்பர்' (சிலப்பதிகாரம், மங்கல வாழ்த்துப் பாடல்)
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