Palm-leaf manuscript

Palm-leaf manuscripts are manuscripts made out of dried palm leaves. Palm leaves were used as writing materials in the Indian subcontinent and in Southeast Asia dating back to the 5th century BCE. Their use began in South Asia and spread to other regions, as texts on dried and smoke-treated palm leaves of the Palmyra or talipot palm.

Quotes

• One of the main reasons why such hard proof or hard circumstantial proof is missing from ancient Indian studies is that our writings were generally inscribed on palm leaves or birch leaves and such writings have not survived. We seldom wrote on perish- able materials like clay which, once burnt, became well-nigh imperishable. This is how so much of the ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian literature has survived whereas the surviving Indus civilisation corpus of writing is amazingly incomplete. This must be the reason why the administrative archives of ancient India have not survived. Some inscriptions do, in fact, imply that there were administrative store houses of documents. That the Indians preferred to record most of the things of their lives on palm leaves has been known even as late as the late nineteenth century when the Indian census recorders of the period returned their ‘proformas’ incised on palm leaves.
  • Dilip K. Chakrabarti, Review of K. Rajan, Early Writing System: A Journey from Graffiti to Brahmi. DOI: 10.1177/0376983617694685