A script in which each consonant letter carries an inherent vowel that is modified or suppressed by an attached diacritic, per Daniels and Bright, who coined the term itself from the traditional Ge'ez name for its own letter order. Belongs here: Devanagari, Brahmi, the ancestral script behind most of South and Southeast Asia's abugidas, Ge'ez Script, Thai Script, Tibetan Script. Does not belong here: an abjad, which omits vowels rather than marking them, or a syllabary, whose consonant-vowel signs are each a single unanalyzable shape rather than a base letter plus a modifying mark.
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1. Wikipedia: Brahmi Script
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The writing system only went through relatively minor evolutionary changes from the Mauryan period (3rd century BCE) down to the early Gupta period (4th century CE), and it is thought that as late as the 4th century CE, a literate person could still read and understand Mauryan inscriptions.
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