I just don't understand how this you can get from this to this
If Indian script was based on a 'Brahmic script' like the one on King Ashoka's edicts, surely modern day Indian script would resemble Greek or Armenian in its written form.
Definitely the 'Indians' at the time seemed to have based/borrowed their alphabet from the Greeks or when the two cultures merged into one the Greek influence remained. In fact one of Ashoka's edicts is actually written in Greek so clearly the 'Indians' were fully aware of the Greek language itself as well as actively borrowing from it.
Devanagari doesn't resemble Greek at all, so did the written Indian language form emerge from a totally different type of Brahmic script?
The resemblance to Armenian script is probably due to a common origin in Aramaic scripts, probably through the Persian adoption of Aramaic language and Aramaic script for official use. For both Armenian script and Brahmi script, the ancestral script isn't known for sure, but the prior use of Aramaic script in Armenia makes it the likely ancestor, and the widespread use of Aramaic makes it the probable ancestor of Brahmi script as well (along with, in both cases, the similarities between Armenian and Brahmi scripts and Aramaic script). Some have suggested that Brahmi script is derived directly from Phoenician script without the intermediary of Aramaic, but the geography and the dating of Brahmi script makes Phoenician to Aramaic (which is based on Phoenician script) to Brahmi more likely. A small minority of scholars (primarily ultranationalist Indians prepared to ignore reality) push the idea of a completely independent Indian invention.
If Indian script was based on a 'Brahmic script' like the one on King Ashoka's edicts, surely modern day Indian script would resemble Greek or Armenian in its written form.
While at first glance there is a huge gulf between Brahmic script and modern Devanagari, the intermediate steps of the evolution of the script show a close relationship between each step:
One factor driving change is the difference between monumental inscriptions in stone and writing with pen or brush. If we take a script - the Latin alphabet - which evolved from stone inscription to written by pen, we can see a similar very large difference between the early form:
and later forms, with this:
a mere 5 centuries later, and
a further 5 centuries later.
