International audience An urban system flourished in central Burma in the first millennium CE, before the ascendancy of the Burmese. Its culture is known to scholars and the public as ‘Pyu’. The written traces of the Pyus take the form of inscriptions on stone and other material, composed in three languages each written in its own type of Indic script. Pyu, the vernacular of Sino-Tibetan stock, predominates; but the cosmopolitan Sanskrit and Pali languages are also represented. This study sketches the archeological context of the epigraphic corpus and provides a history of prior research on the Pyu language. It establishes a methodology and notation for analyzing and representing Pyu inscriptional materials that can be applied to future research, and summarizes what we have been able to ascertain so far about the Pyu script and language, advancing knowledge in this field by an edition and linguistic analysis of the important bilingual Sanskrit-Pyu Kan Wet Khaung Mound inscription. It concludes with an inventory of known inscriptions associated with the Pyu culture that establishes stable reference numbers for each item, in association with pertinent data (location, available reproductions, references, etc.).