Inscribed on palm leaves

[Sri Lanka - palm leaf book]. [Palm leaf manuscript].

€ 2,800.00

An impressively lengthy palm leaf manuscript, painstakingly inscribed on nearly 250 individual pressed palm leaves. Palm leaf manuscript traditions are found throughout Southeast Asia, written in languages like Pali (itself written in various scripts, including Sinhala), Burmese, Tamil, and more. This manuscript is likely Tamil and from Sri Lanka; a similar collection of 30 digitized Tamil palm leaf manuscripts can be found at the Digital Tamil Palm-Leaf Manuscripts Collection at the University of Toronto's UTSC Library.

Despite the extra skill required to write on them, palm leaves are more durable than vellum or paper, especially in hot or humid environments; as such they are one of the most ancient writing surfaces in the world, with a manuscript tradition in Southeast Asia and India stretching back millennia. The texts of palm leaf manuscripts are first etched into dried and treated palm frond strips by a trained scribe armed with a small sharp stylus. The scribe then rubs ink into the etched lines of the letter-forms; this labour-intensive process can be seen in the pages of this manuscript.