The author (Gerard Ambroise) who was a retired electrical engineer had many passions (cooking, photography, history, Tamil, mathematics, engineering, music, etc.), one of which is manifested through this book.  Gerard Ambroise was a proud Tamilian with a keen interest in the Tamil language and culture.   During his studies of the Tamil Brahmi inscriptions he realized that inscriptions found by the British scholar Alexander Rea had not been published in their entirety.

 

Hence, Gerard Ambroise set out to venture to get all the pictures of the inscriptions and to read them and translate them in English.  He went to the source and took photos of all the stone caskets.  For the first time, he endeavored to feature all the inscriptions in this book in the hopes of establishing a record of the relic stone caskets of Bhattiprolu with inscription and translation details (in English and Sanskrit versions of the Prakrit).

 

From the beginning when Alexander Rea in 1892 excavated the stupa of Bhattiprolu, the British scholars including G.Bühler and others wrote about the inscriptions stating that  some strange letters were found that did not conform to the letters of Asokan Brahmi.  Later some scholars like Richard Salomon of University of Washington, wrote that the Bhattiprolu script was originally invented to write Dravidian languages but was reapplied to inscribe an Indo-Aryan Prakrit.  Even though the language is Prakrit in Bhattiprolu inscriptions, the author proves that the script used for the inscriptions was 80% Tamil Brahmi and only 20% Asokan Brahmi. Also, the Bhattiprolu inscriptions are shown to be dated Pre Ashokan period as evidenced by the author.

 

Sadly, the author died unexpectedly on January 29th, 2021.  His three children (Anita, Eric and Sonia) wanted his last passion project to be shared with the world.  He was planning to launch/publish the book in February 2021.