Writing like music is an art. It is a process of recording our speech for possible future use. It is believed to have developed through recording business contracts when interaction in trade happened among longer distance communities. The goods had to be labeled and the price had to be fixed. In such transactions, labeling a picture or counting lines did the work. This would explain why the original writings did not need to invent a symbol for "zero.". The transition to phonetic symbols and representing speech in such symbols was a major change. The history and generation of such symbols are not properly studied but we do get rock and metal inscriptions from which we can decipher alphabets. The mathematical theory regarding the number of symbols for a full representation of speech is also lacking and an alphabet is treated a part of one's culture. While there must be an evolution process, we lack any evidence to investigate. Written scripts appear formed to their limits. Two technical words are used in the analysis of inscription. The first is "epigraphy", the art of studying the writing on the medium. The rocks are carved and the metals are etched. The alphabet symbols are texturally modified to fit to the medium. A special group of artists became letter engravers, such profession continues today that depicts various ways of handwriting. One studies the text by determining a pattern and applying the pattern to the text. "orthography" is a discipline that would study how the speech is represented in the writing symbols. Speech has tone variation, prosody and punctuation and a good representation would need to establish various markings in the writing. One has to decipher them in the carvings and etching to detect the alphabet such that a general understanding can be created. Greek alphabet symbols could help decode the Egyptian hieroglyphs where the common material was found in a tablet later called Rosetta Stone. No such luck has come to unravel the Mayan scripts or the scripts discovered at Indus Valley in India. The earliest formal writing on stones in India is ascribed to Asokan edicts of third century BC, since no hard evidence has been discovered through the intervening two thousand years. What we have in the Angkor Museum are sheets of printed scripts with the likely dates associated with it determined from the material where the engraving or the etching was discovered. The dates if the first batch were between first century and sixth century AD, the period when the sea trade between India and Cambodia started from the eastern coast of India. While we had frescoes and statues done during this period in India, we did not have any stone carvings. I was told by the Curator that the language inscribed was Sanskrit written in Cambodian script. It is believed that the Sanskrit never developed a writing scheme because the scholars thought that the richness of oral expression would be lost through a static representation. With the assumption that the human expression is a divine endowment, there were careful efforts to preserve the oral renderings. All learning was oral. Religious and literary books were memorized and transmitted to the students. Continued transmission helped preserve the purity of the language. In parallel there was the language of social use which is lately called Prakrit. By definition, Prakrit is older and more fundamental than Sanskrit language. Prakrit gave rise to a language called Pali which created its writing style that Asoka used. The eventual Sanskrit writing style and the styles of most Indian languages came from a pattern which has been called Brahmi. Brahmi in turn is connected to the original writing style developed by the Phoenicians in the Middle East. The Brahmi script used in Pali developed syllabic representation than phonetic representation. In syllabic representation each letter is complete in its meaning and then extends the meaning as new syllables are added. The material in Angkor has this characteristic of a string of letters strewn in a row written left to right. The face of the letters looked like that of my mother tongue Oriya, though we do not have any Oriya inscription of that early period in Orissa. These letters are more rounded than the rectangular Brahmi inscription we see on the hills of Orissa.