Palm-leaf manuscript
Palm-leaf manuscripts were used as writing material in the Indian subcontinent, dating back to as early as the 5th century BCE.[1] Their use began in Nepal and India and spread to other regions, such as Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, in the form of dried and smoke-treated Palmyra or talipot palm leaves.[2] Their use continued until the 19th century when the printing press replaced hand-written manuscripts.[2]
One of the oldest surviving complete palm leaf manuscripts is a Sanskrit Shaivism text from the 9th century, discovered in Nepal, and now preserved at the Cambridge University Library.[3] The Spitzer Manuscript is a collection of palm leaf fragments found in Kizil Caves, China. They are dated to around the 2nd century CE and are written in Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit.[4][5]
The text in palm leaf manuscripts was inscribed with a knife pen on rectangular cut and cured palm leaf sheets; colourings were then applied to the surface and wiped off, leaving the ink in the incised grooves. Typically, each sheet had a hole through which a string could pass, and using these holes, the sheets were bound together like a book by tying them together with a string. Such palm leaf texts typically had a lifespan of between a few decades and roughly 600 years before they started to rot due to moisture, insect activity, mould, and fragility. Thus the document had to be copied onto new sets of dried palm leaves.[2] The oldest surviving palm leaf Indian manuscripts have been found in colder, drier climates such as in parts of Nepal, Tibet, and central Asia, the source of 1st-millennium CE manuscripts.
Further reading
Palm-leaf manuscript, Wikipedia
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Notes
- ↑ Zhixin Shi; Srirangaraj Setlur; Venu Govindaraju. "Digital Enhancement of Palm Leaf Manuscript Images using Normalization Techniques" (PDF). Amherst, US: SUNY at Buffalo. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2010-06-16. Retrieved 2009-06-23. Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help) - ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2
"10. Literature", The Story of India - Photo Gallery, PBS, Explore the topic, palm-leaf manuscripts, archived from the original on 2013-11-13, retrieved 2013-11-13 Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help) - ↑ Pārameśvaratantra (MS Add.1049.1) with images Archived 2016-03-08 at the Wayback Machine., Puṣkarapārameśvaratantra, University of Cambridge (2015)
- ↑ Eli Franco (2003). "The Oldest Philosophical Manuscript in Sanskrit". Journal of Indian Philosophy. 31 (1/3): 21–31. doi:10.1023/A:1024690001755. JSTOR 23497034. Unknown parameter
|s2cid=ignored (help);
Eli Franco (2005). "Three Notes on the Spitzer Manuscript". Journal of South Asian Studies. 49: 109–111. JSTOR 24007655. - ↑ Noriyuki Kudo (2007). "Review: Eli FRANCO (ed.), The Spitzer Manuscript: The Oldest Philosophical Manuscript in Sanskrit, 2 vols". Nagoya Studies in Indian Culture and Buddhism: Saṃbhāṣā. 26: 169–173.