Scott:

These are interesting comparisons. Your characters are, apparently,
Devanagari, and the lack of a top line made me think of Gujarati. The first
character looks strikingly similar to Gujarati lla, the fourth and the
second-to-last like Gujarati pa, and the sixth like Gujarati la (see
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0A80.pdf for Gujarati samples). The
second is like Gujarati ga but with a top line. But I can't match every
character in the sample with modern Gujarati characters.

It seems likely, though, that this sample could represent some common
ancestor to northern Indic scripts. At least, that's the best hypothesis
I've seen yet (after entertaining suggestions as diverse as Demotic, Khmer
and Georgian). Thanks for the insight.



Peter