Gujarati — <1600 AD, India

Gujarati "tha"

Gujarati is a direct descendant of Devanagari, used mostly but not exclusively for writing the Gujarati language.

Like the Landa scripts, Gujarati was initially used mostly for commerce. It is sometimes called “banker’s script”, “merchant’s script”, or “trader’s script” in the native language(s).

Like the Landa scripts, it was purportedly used in part to make it more difficult for outsiders to read documents in it, since Gujarati wasn’t terribly well known (at first).  Unlike the Landa scripts, it does not appear to have developed lots of regional variations.

One of its advantages for commerce is that it could be written faster than Devanagari, in part because Gujarati did away with the horizontal line (the “head” line) at the top of the characters.  Devanagari characters sometimes have a headline and sometimes don’t, so you have to be a little bit careful about where you draw the headline.

Links: Wikipedia, Ancient Scripts, Omniglot