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Buddhism in the Maldives was the predominant religion at least until the 12th century CE. It is not clear how Buddhism was introduced into the islands although there are a number of competing theories. The predominant view is that it was introduced with the expansion of the Sinhalese people from neighboring Sri Lanka who are primarily Buddhist.<br/><br/> In February 2012, a group of Islamic extremists forced their way into the National Museum in Male and attacked the museum's collection of pre-Islamic sculptures, destroying or severely damaging nearly the entire collection about thirty Hindu and Buddhist sculptures dating from the 6th to 12th centuries.<br/><br/> Museum staff indicated that as the sculptures were made from very brittle coral or limestone it would be impossible to repair most of them, and only two or three pieces were in a repairable condition.
Brāhmī is the modern name given to the oldest members of the Brahmic family of scripts. The best-known Brāhmī inscriptions are the rock-cut edicts of Ashoka in north-central India, dated to the 3rd century BCE. These are traditionally considered to be the earliest known examples of Brāhmī writing, though recent discoveries suggest that Brāhmī may be somewhat older. The script was deciphered in 1837 by James Prinsep, an archaeologist, philologist, and official of the British East India Company. Like its contemporary in what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan, Kharoṣṭhī, Brāhmī was an abugida. Brāhmī was ancestral to most of the scripts of South Asia and Southeast Asia, several Central Asian scripts such as Tibetan and Khotanese, and possibly, in part, Korean Hangul.