BalaramaBalarama (Sanskrit: बलराम, IAST: Balarāma) is a Hindu god and the elder brother of Krishna. He is particularly significant in the Jagannath tradition, as one of the triad deities. He is also known as Haladhara, Halayudha, Baladeva, Balabhadra, and Sankarshana. The first two epithets associate him with hala (langala, "plough") from his strong associations with farming and farmers, as the deity who used farm equipment as weapons when needed, and the next two refer to his strength.
Heliodorus pillarThe Heliodorus pillar is a stone column that was erected around 113 BCE in central India in Besnagar (near Vidisha, Madhya Pradesh). The pillar was called the Garuda-standard by Heliodorus, referring to the deity Garuda. The pillar is commonly named after Heliodorus, who was an ambassador of the Indo-Greek king Antialcidas from Taxila, and was sent to the Indian ruler Bhagabhadra. A dedication written in Brahmi script was inscribed on the pillar, venerating Vāsudeva, the Deva deva the "God of Gods" and the Supreme Deity.
ViramaVirama (विराम/हलन्त ्) is a Sanskrit phonological concept to suppress the inherent vowel that otherwise occurs with every consonant letter, commonly used as a generic term for a codepoint in Unicode, representing either halanta, hasanta or explicit virāma, a diacritic in many Brahmic scripts, including the Devanagari and Bengali scripts, or saṃyuktākṣara (Sanskrit: संयुक्ताक्षर) or implicit virama, a conjunct consonant or ligature.
ShakyaShakya (Pāḷi: Sakya; शाक्य) was an ancient eastern sub-Himalayan ethnicity and clan of north-eastern region of the Indian subcontinent, whose existence is attested during the Iron Age. The Shakyas were organised into a gaṇasaṅgha (an aristocratic oligarchic republic), also known as the Shakya Republic. The Shakyas were on the periphery, both geographically and culturally, of the eastern Gangetic plain in the Greater Magadha cultural region.
VisargaVisarga (विसर्गः) means "sending forth, discharge". In Sanskrit phonology (), (also called, equivalently, by earlier grammarians) is the name of the voiceless glottal fricative, [h], written as 'ः'. Visarga is an allophone of /r/ and /s/ in pausa (at the end of an utterance). Since /-s/ is a common inflectional suffix (of nominative singular, second person singular, etc.), visarga appears frequently in Sanskrit texts. In the traditional order of Sanskrit sounds, visarga and anusvāra appear between vowels and stop consonants.
Tocharian scriptThe Tocharian script, also known as Central Asian slanting Gupta script or North Turkestan Brāhmī, is an abugida which uses a system of diacritical marks to associate vowels with consonant symbols. Part of the Brahmic scripts, it is a version of the Indian Brahmi script. It is used to write the Central Asian Indo-European Tocharian languages, mostly from the 8th century (with a few earlier ones, probably as early as 300 CE) that were written on palm leaves, wooden tablets and Chinese paper, preserved by the extremely dry climate of the Tarim Basin.
Sharada scriptThe Śāradā, Sarada or Sharada script is an abugida writing system of the Brahmic family of scripts. The script was widespread between the 8th and 12th centuries in the northwestern parts of Indian Subcontinent (in Kashmir and neighbouring areas), for writing Sanskrit and Kashmiri. Originally more widespread, its use became later restricted to Kashmir, and it is now rarely used except by the Kashmiri Pandit community for religious purposes.
BhagavataThe Bhagavata tradition, also called Bhagavatism, refers to an ancient religious sect that traced its origin to the region of Mathura. After its syncretism with the Brahmanical tradition of Vishnu, Bhagavatism became a pan-Indian tradition by the second century BCE, according to R.C. Majumdar. Historically, Bhagavatism corresponds to the development of a popular theistic movement in India, departing from the elitist sacrificial rites of Vedism, and initially focusing on the worship of the Vrishni hero Vāsudeva in the region of Mathura.
NandinagariNandināgarī is a Brahmic script derived from the Nāgarī script which appeared in the 7th century AD. This script and its variants were used in the central Deccan region and south India, and an abundance of Sanskrit manuscripts in Nandināgarī have been discovered but remain untransliterated. Some of the discovered manuscripts of Madhvacharya of the Dvaita Vedanta school of Hinduism are in Nandināgarī script. It is a sister script to Devanāgarī, which is common in other parts of India. Nāgarī comes from नगर (), which means city.
Balinese scriptThe Balinese script, natively known as Aksara Bali and Hanacaraka, is an abugida used in the island of Bali, Indonesia, commonly for writing the Austronesian Balinese language, Old Javanese, and the liturgical language Sanskrit. With some modifications, the script is also used to write the Sasak language, used in the neighboring island of Lombok. The script is a descendant of the Brahmi script, and so has many similarities with the modern scripts of South and Southeast Asia.
