Dhivas Akuru — 1200 AD, Maldives

Dhives Akuru "aa"

The Maldives, despite being a chain of really tiny islands ~400km off the coast of India, was literate enough to develop its own script no later than the 12th century AD.  This script was a evolutionary derivative of Grantha.  In around 1600 AD, another script started being used, and pushed out Dhivas Akuru.

Note that Dhivas Akuru was around long enough to evolve; the earlier form is called Evela Akuru.  There were a few characters that were added in order to cope with loan words from Arabic, which was becoming more common while the islands converted to Islam.  Otherwise, the changes were merely minor cosmetic changes in the shapes of the glyphs.  I did not feel they were different enough to warrant separate blog postings, but others might disagree.

Links: Wikipedia, Omniglot, Ancient Scripts, Unicode Proposal, Wikipedia on writing systems of the Maldives