The oldest deciphered writing in India is Prakrit. The edicts Ashoka had cut on rocks and pillars in the third century BCE, in the Brahmi and Kharoshthi scripts, are in regional Prakrits, and they are a religious document as much as a political one. They set out dhamma as a public ethic, record the king's remorse after the conquest of Kalinga, and enjoin respect between sects and restraint in the killing of animals. Because they are dated, located and in the vernacular, they anchor the chronology of early Indian religion.
Prakrit then had a long literary career. Maharashtri became the language of lyric poetry, above all in the anthology of seven hundred verses attributed to a Satavahana king, and Sanskrit drama assigns Prakrit to particular characters by convention, so that a single play may carry three or four registers with the social position of the speaker determining which is used.
The survey edited by George Cardona and Dhanesh Jain places the Prakrits in the descent from Old to Middle to New Indo-Aryan, and the modern languages of the north, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Hindi and the rest, come through them. Prakrit is therefore both a scriptural language still in liturgical use among Jains and the ancestral stage of the speech of several hundred million people.