Dhives Akuru

Dhives Akuru developed from Brahmi. The oldest attested inscription bears a clear resemblance to South Indian epigraphical records of the sixth-eighth centuries, written in local subtypes of the Brahmi script. The letters on later inscriptions are clearly of the cursive type, strongly reminding of the medieval scripts used in Sri Lanka and South India such as Sinhala, Grantha and Vatteluttu. There are also some elements from the Kannada-Telugu scripts visible. Since then its use has been limited to scholars and hobbyists. It can still be found on gravestones and some monuments, including the stone base of the pillars supporting the main structure of the ancient Friday mosque in Malé. Bell obtained an astrology book written in Dhives Akuru in Addu Atoll, in the south of the Maldives, during one of his trips. This book is now kept in the National Archives of Sri Lanka in Colombo. Bodufenvalhuge Sidi, an eminent Maldivian scholar, wrote a book called Divehi Akuru in 1959, prompted by then Prime Minister Ibrahim Nasir. ==Letters==

Below are the Grantha derived Akuru letters. A few consonants can be marked as nasalised by prefixing the diacritic . Some additional consonants are transcribed by adding a nuqta to certain letters. Vowels == Numerals ==

The numeral signs in Dhives Akuru are the basis of nine of the letters used in Thaana, the modern Maldivian alphabet. ==Unicode==

The Dhives Akuru script was added to Unicode version 13.0 in March 2020, with 72 characters located in the Dives Akuru block (U+11900–U+1195F): ==References==