Evolution from Brahmi

I'm finally getting more serious about making my South Asian type dreams come true! So that means, in addition to just collecting interesting typography examples, I'll start posting more research/history/informative entries. Hopefully they'll help someone else out there!

In studying Latin-based typography, it was SO helpful to learn the full evolution of writing systems, and the variants in environment, geography, culture, language, and technology that determine why letterforms from different cultures look the way they do. So now I'm on a quest to thoroughly research the history of South Asian writing - I'm not expecting that I'll be able to make posts in historical chronological order, but I'll at least try to get more and more in-depth, so it'll be worth it! Let's crack open the internet and see what I can find! (Hopefully there will be plenty written in English!)

Anyway, above are two diagrams showing the basic evolution of different scripts, all originating from Brahmi. The left image shows South Asian scripts, the diagram on the right shows South-East Asian scripts, which evolved from the 6th century Southern deviation. Found on Colorado State's Languages and Scripts of India page.