A manuscript has been discovered with Indus script: Lucy Zuber Buehler (2009) (Updated Nov. 17, 2011)
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S. Kalyanaraman
Nov 17, 2011, 5:42:58 AM11/17/11
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Original Posting on 14.11.11
A manuscript has been discovered with Indus script: Lucy Zuber Buehler (2009)
Updated Nov. 17, 2011
Photograph of lower portion of mss. Media identity number SN05 1000, 7086 in: Western Himalaya Archive, Vienna, 2009 (See photo gallery - Figures 1 to 4 appended to thesis).
[A note on the Professor who supervised the thesis: Prof. Dr. em. Roland Bielmeier, Emeritierter Professor für Historisch-vergleichende Linguistik, Universität Bern
Institut für Sprachwissenschaft, Länggassstrasse 49, CH-3000 Bern 9, Büro B 163
Sprechstunde: nach Vereinbarung
Projektleitung von
Grammatik des Tibetischen
Der griechische Lehnwortschatz im Georgischen
Source: http://tinyurl.com/d9uotg7
Prof. Dr. Roland Bielmeier, Faculty of Humanities, Institute of Linguistics.
See: Chomolangma, Demawend und Kasbe : Festschrift fur Roland Bielmeier zu Seinem 65 Geburtstag. Von, ISBN: 3882800798 Erschienen: bei VGH Wissenschaftsverlag.] See also:http://tinyurl.com/cjbc2bt
Linguistics of the Himalayas and Beyond (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs) Roland Bielmeier, Felix Haller (Eds.) (2007)ISBN-13: 978-3110198287, Mouton.
Wooden plate with inscription in a Tocharian language. Kucha, 5th-8th century. Tokyo National Museum.
A fragment of Buddha's teachings - AP picture (computer enhanced)Buddhist bhūrjapatra text (1st cent CE) http://web.archive.org/web/20001009184406/http://www.buddhanet.net/mag_scr.htm
bhūrja = lekhana, writing
Kharoshthi Manuscript from Gandhara (M. Nasim Khan) This book focuses on the preliminary study of a unique and rare collection of 19 fragments of Buddhist and private documents written in the Kharoshthi script, which can be dated to the 1st-3rd century AD. The author has been working on the collection since 1999 and has already published a report on it in 2004 (JHSS, Vol. XII, Nos. 1 & 2, 2004).
"Xuanzang's travelogues and the Harshacharita, written in 7th century A.D. in Northern India, mentions use of agarwood products such as 'Xasipat' (writing-material) and 'aloe-oil' in ancient Assam (Kamarupa). The tradition of making writing materials from its bark still exists in Assam...In Assamese it is called as "sasi" or "sashi"" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agarwood
"Birch and Aloe Bark. Sanskri bhūrja-patra (literally, 'the birch leaf') is in reality a sheet of the required size cut out fo the inner bark of the bhurja or birch tree grown in the Himalayas. In the 11th century, Al-Birūni said, 'In Central and Northern India, people use the bark fo the tuz tree, one kind of which is used as a cover for bows It is called bhūrja. They take a piece one yard long and as broad as the outstretched fingers of the hand, or somewhat less, and prepare it in various ways. They oil and polish it so as to make it hard and smooth, and then they write on it...Their letters and whatever else they have to write they write on the bark fo the tūj tree.' (Sachau, Alberuni's India, Part I, p.171). Q. Curtius seems to refer to the Indian practice of writing on birch bark when he says that, at the time of Alexander's invasion, the Indians used the tender bark of tree for writing. (Buhler, Indian Paleography, p. 6). A synonym of bhūrja is lekhana, i.e. 'writing' or 'a written document', while it is also recognised in the sense of other words meaning 'a written document'. The use of birch bark is supposed to have started in the northwest, although copper plates of the central, eastern and western regions of India, cut to the shape of birch-bark sheets, suggests the spread of the custom in early times. In North India, letters were generally written on birch-bark sheets...Among the earliest birch-bark manuscript so far discovered, we may count the Khotan copy of the Prakrit Dhammapada written in Kharoṣṭhī characters of about the 2nd or 3rd century CE, the manuscripts of the Sanskrit Buddhist work Samyuktagamasutra copied about the 4th century CE, the Bower manuscripts (the sheets of which have a hole in the middle for string to pass through) and the Bakshali manuscript of a mathematical work copied about the 8th century CE. (For some manuscripts dating from the 6th century, cf. N. Dutt, Gilgit Manuscripts, Vol. I, intr.) But the majority of birch-bark manuscripts are of the 15th and later centuries. The originals of many of the royal charters and other records later copied on copper plates or stone were apparently written on birch-bark sheets. The inner bark of the Aguru or Aloe tree (Aquilaria agallocha), called Sã̄ci in Assam, was the most popular material for writing manuscripts in the north-eastern corner of India. (See JASB, 189, p. 109). The sheets of this bark, made specially ready for writing, were called Sã̄ci-pat (literally, 'the Sã̄ci leaf') in Assamese. A large number of manuscripts written on this material have been discovered in Assam and some of them have found their way to the libraries and museums of the Western countries. (Journ. As., 1958, pp. 85 ff.) A manuscript of the Sundarakāṇḍa of the Rāmāyaṇa, written on aloe-bark sheets in the Bengali-Maithili-Assamese characters of about the 15th century, is preserved in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. It is believed that some of the bark sheets of the manuscript contain a layer of wood with them. (cf ibid., Plate IX, p. 86)." (DC Sircar, 1996, Indian Epigraphy, Motilal Banarsidass Publ., pp.63-65).
In western Himalayan areas such as Kashmir, birch bark was used, and aloe bark in eastern parts uch as Assam. The earliest surviving South Asian manuscripts are Buddhist scrolls of birch bark from the ancient kingdom of Gandhara (which straddled modern Pakistan and Afghanistn) dating from the first century C.E. (Simon Eliot, Jonathan Rose, 2011, A companion to the history of the Book, John Wiley & Sons, p. 127; loc.cit., Salomon, R., 1999, Ancient Buddhist scrolls from Gandhara: The British Library Kharosthi Fragments, London: British Library).
"The oldest known Sanskrit manuscript written on birch bark, until 1994, dates from the fifth century CE and a Pali manuscript in Kharosthi is older, but the use of the material doubtless goes back to far earlier days. Thus we have the statement of Quintus Curtius that the Indians employed it for writing at the time of Alexander. In 1994 the British Library acquired a unique collection of fifty-seven fragments of Buddhist manuscripts on birch bark scrolls, written in the Kharosthi script and the Gandhari (Prakrit) language. The manuscripts date from, most likely, the first century A.D., and as such are the oldest surviving Buddhist texts, which promise to provide unprecedented insights into the early history of Buddhism in north India and in central and east Asia."http://thaimangoes.blogspot.com/2009/08/f9.html
Links:
The senior manuscripts: another collection of Gandharan Buddhist scrolls by Richard Salomon,Journal of the American Oriental Society, The / Jan-March, 2003: "The Senior collection is superficially similar in character to the British Library collection in that they both consist of about two dozen birch bark manuscripts or manuscript fragments arranged in scroll or similar format and written in Kharosthi script and Gandhari language. Both were found inside inscribed clay pots, and both are believed to have come from the same or nearby sites, in or around Hadda in eastern Afghanistan."
"In the Indian civilization birch-bark, along with dried palm leaves, replaced parchment as the primary writing medium. The oldest known Buddhist manuscripts (some of the Gandharan Buddhist Texts), from Afghanistan, were written on birch bark."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birch_bark
Dominik Wujastyk, University of Vienna, August 2001, rev. October 2011, Indian Manuscripts; Author's pre-publication, pre-edited draft. To appear in: Jorg Quenzer and Jan-Ulrich Sobisch (eds.), Manuscript Cultures: Mapping the Field (Berlin: De Gruyter, scheduled for November 2012).Studies in Manuscript Cultures, volume 1. http://www.degruyter.de/cont/fb/ph/detailEn.cfm?id=IS-9783110225624-1
Peter Monaghan, 2006, 'Birch-Bark manuscripts could reveal when Buddhism moved to China' The Chronicle of Higher Education 52: A22.
http://chronicle.com/article/Birch-Bark-Manuscripts-Coul/34632/
Filliozat, Jean. 1947. “Manuscripts on Birch Bark (bhurjapatra) and Their Preservation.” The Indian Archives 1: 102–8.
"...old birch bark manuscript of Munimata- mani-mala which is the earliest known Sharada manuscript discovered so far in Kashmir, assignable on palacographich ground to the 14th century 12. The other early known manuscripts are the birch bark manuscript of Shakuntala 13, birch bark manuscript of the Adi and Sabha Parvan of the Mahabharata and the birch bark manuscript of Kathasarit- sagara,15 all assignable to 16th century." The Sharada Script: Origin and Developmentby B. K. Kaul Deambi
This is a sensational discovery of a bark manuscript with Indus script (See embedded document). In a lucidly argued thesis, Lucy Zuber Buehler (2009) demonstrates that the provenanced manuscript does contain writing in Indus script.
"The artefact in question consists of a strip of what would appear to be several thin layers of bark, with seven lines of symbols running across it. A cursory perusal of the approximately 200 symbols, could lead a layperson with a rudimentary knowledge of the Indus script, to propose that the text at hand might have been composed using signs that appear in the Indus script, for some of the most common and well-known Indus signs seem to be present on the bark manuscript. It remains to be seen, however, exactly how many of the graphs on the bark object could be considered attested Indus symbols." (ibid., p. 3)
It is time for the announcers of a prize to settle and pay up the prize money, without waiting for decoding/decipherment/translation of mss.
Kalyanaraman
LucyZuberbuehlerindusscriptmss2009
Note on Indian Manuscripts
"...What, then, really defines an “Indian manuscript?” For most specialists, this expression conjures up the idea of a hand-written document inscribed on paper or palm leaf, in Devanāgarī or one of the other alphabets of South or Central Asia, and typically in the Sanskrit, Tamil or Persian language. But one has to bear in mind that the boundaries of definition are fluid, and that a manuscript from China, written on birch-bark in the Kharoṣṭhī script of Gandhāra and the Middle-Iranian language called Khotanese, may also be considered, in many respects, an Indian manuscript, for example if it contains a translation of a Sanskrit treatise on Buddhism or ayurveda, or if it was produced in a Buddhist monastery that still had living links with India. It is also important to remember that Islamic culture began to influence India over a thousand years ago, and has left a huge legacy of manuscripts and paintings, especially from the courtly centres of the Sultans and Mughals. Islamic Indian manuscripts are often written in the Persian language and script, but there are also many surviving manuscripts in Arabic and Urdu, written in variant forms of the Perso-Arabic alphabet. The present chapter will focus mainly on Sanskrit and Prakrit manuscripts, which form by far the greatest bulk of surviving manuscript materials in South Asia, and which represent the continuous cultural heritage of India dating back to the second millennium BCE...
Birch bark was the most fragile writing support used widely in early India, being associated especially with Kashmir. Surviving birch bark manuscripts flake and split when handled, and present almost insurmountable problems for the conservator, with encapsulation often being the only recourse...
While wood, cloth, copper and other writing supports were sometimes used, the principle writing supports in India have been birch bark, palm leaf and paper. Papyrus and parchment were unknown, the latter due to the widely-shared Brahman religious concepts of vegetarianism and harmlessness to living creatures (Skt. ahiṃsā). Broadly speaking, in the north and west of the subcontinent, early manuscripts were written on scrolls made of the bark of the birch tree, flattened, glued into sheets and cut to scrolls or to sheets. Kashmir was a noted source of the manufacture of this material, which was also exported to Central Asia and south to the Panjab. Birch bark was still being used for manuscript production as late as the seventeenth century. Writing on the smooth, flat surface of birch bark was done with ink and a stylus, and the horizontal and vertical strokes could be emphasized calligraphically. This technique carried over to palm leaf and later to paper, after its widespread introduction in the early second millennium AD. The most common script used on birch bark manuscripts is Śāradā." (Dominik Wujaystik, opcit.)
wujastyk-indian-manuscripts-minorupdate1
[A note on the Professor who supervised the thesis: Prof. Dr. em. Roland Bielmeier, Emeritierter Professor für Historisch-vergleichende Linguistik, Universität Bern
Institut für Sprachwissenschaft, Länggassstrasse 49, CH-3000 Bern 9, Büro B 163
Sprechstunde: nach Vereinbarung
Projektleitung von
Grammatik des Tibetischen
Der griechische Lehnwortschatz im Georgischen
Source: http://tinyurl.com/d9uotg7
Prof. Dr. Roland Bielmeier, Faculty of Humanities, Institute of Linguistics.
See: Chomolangma, Demawend und Kasbe : Festschrift fur Roland Bielmeier zu Seinem 65 Geburtstag. Von, ISBN: 3882800798 Erschienen: bei VGH Wissenschaftsverlag.] See also:http://tinyurl.com/cjbc2bt
Linguistics of the Himalayas and Beyond (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs) Roland Bielmeier, Felix Haller (Eds.) (2007)ISBN-13: 978-3110198287, Mouton.
A fragment of Buddha's teachings - AP picture (computer enhanced)Buddhist bhūrjapatra text (1st cent CE) http://web.archive.org/web/20001009184406/http://www.buddhanet.net/mag_scr.htm
bhūrja = lekhana, writing
Kharoshthi Manuscript from Gandhara (M. Nasim Khan) This book focuses on the preliminary study of a unique and rare collection of 19 fragments of Buddhist and private documents written in the Kharoshthi script, which can be dated to the 1st-3rd century AD. The author has been working on the collection since 1999 and has already published a report on it in 2004 (JHSS, Vol. XII, Nos. 1 & 2, 2004).
"Xuanzang's travelogues and the Harshacharita, written in 7th century A.D. in Northern India, mentions use of agarwood products such as 'Xasipat' (writing-material) and 'aloe-oil' in ancient Assam (Kamarupa). The tradition of making writing materials from its bark still exists in Assam...In Assamese it is called as "sasi" or "sashi"" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agarwood
"Birch and Aloe Bark. Sanskri bhūrja-patra (literally, 'the birch leaf') is in reality a sheet of the required size cut out fo the inner bark of the bhurja or birch tree grown in the Himalayas. In the 11th century, Al-Birūni said, 'In Central and Northern India, people use the bark fo the tuz tree, one kind of which is used as a cover for bows It is called bhūrja. They take a piece one yard long and as broad as the outstretched fingers of the hand, or somewhat less, and prepare it in various ways. They oil and polish it so as to make it hard and smooth, and then they write on it...Their letters and whatever else they have to write they write on the bark fo the tūj tree.' (Sachau, Alberuni's India, Part I, p.171). Q. Curtius seems to refer to the Indian practice of writing on birch bark when he says that, at the time of Alexander's invasion, the Indians used the tender bark of tree for writing. (Buhler, Indian Paleography, p. 6). A synonym of bhūrja is lekhana, i.e. 'writing' or 'a written document', while it is also recognised in the sense of other words meaning 'a written document'. The use of birch bark is supposed to have started in the northwest, although copper plates of the central, eastern and western regions of India, cut to the shape of birch-bark sheets, suggests the spread of the custom in early times. In North India, letters were generally written on birch-bark sheets...Among the earliest birch-bark manuscript so far discovered, we may count the Khotan copy of the Prakrit Dhammapada written in Kharoṣṭhī characters of about the 2nd or 3rd century CE, the manuscripts of the Sanskrit Buddhist work Samyuktagamasutra copied about the 4th century CE, the Bower manuscripts (the sheets of which have a hole in the middle for string to pass through) and the Bakshali manuscript of a mathematical work copied about the 8th century CE. (For some manuscripts dating from the 6th century, cf. N. Dutt, Gilgit Manuscripts, Vol. I, intr.) But the majority of birch-bark manuscripts are of the 15th and later centuries. The originals of many of the royal charters and other records later copied on copper plates or stone were apparently written on birch-bark sheets. The inner bark of the Aguru or Aloe tree (Aquilaria agallocha), called Sã̄ci in Assam, was the most popular material for writing manuscripts in the north-eastern corner of India. (See JASB, 189, p. 109). The sheets of this bark, made specially ready for writing, were called Sã̄ci-pat (literally, 'the Sã̄ci leaf') in Assamese. A large number of manuscripts written on this material have been discovered in Assam and some of them have found their way to the libraries and museums of the Western countries. (Journ. As., 1958, pp. 85 ff.) A manuscript of the Sundarakāṇḍa of the Rāmāyaṇa, written on aloe-bark sheets in the Bengali-Maithili-Assamese characters of about the 15th century, is preserved in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. It is believed that some of the bark sheets of the manuscript contain a layer of wood with them. (cf ibid., Plate IX, p. 86)." (DC Sircar, 1996, Indian Epigraphy, Motilal Banarsidass Publ., pp.63-65).
In western Himalayan areas such as Kashmir, birch bark was used, and aloe bark in eastern parts uch as Assam. The earliest surviving South Asian manuscripts are Buddhist scrolls of birch bark from the ancient kingdom of Gandhara (which straddled modern Pakistan and Afghanistn) dating from the first century C.E. (Simon Eliot, Jonathan Rose, 2011, A companion to the history of the Book, John Wiley & Sons, p. 127; loc.cit., Salomon, R., 1999, Ancient Buddhist scrolls from Gandhara: The British Library Kharosthi Fragments, London: British Library).
"The oldest known Sanskrit manuscript written on birch bark, until 1994, dates from the fifth century CE and a Pali manuscript in Kharosthi is older, but the use of the material doubtless goes back to far earlier days. Thus we have the statement of Quintus Curtius that the Indians employed it for writing at the time of Alexander. In 1994 the British Library acquired a unique collection of fifty-seven fragments of Buddhist manuscripts on birch bark scrolls, written in the Kharosthi script and the Gandhari (Prakrit) language. The manuscripts date from, most likely, the first century A.D., and as such are the oldest surviving Buddhist texts, which promise to provide unprecedented insights into the early history of Buddhism in north India and in central and east Asia."http://thaimangoes.blogspot.com/2009/08/f9.html
Links:
The senior manuscripts: another collection of Gandharan Buddhist scrolls by Richard Salomon,Journal of the American Oriental Society, The / Jan-March, 2003: "The Senior collection is superficially similar in character to the British Library collection in that they both consist of about two dozen birch bark manuscripts or manuscript fragments arranged in scroll or similar format and written in Kharosthi script and Gandhari language. Both were found inside inscribed clay pots, and both are believed to have come from the same or nearby sites, in or around Hadda in eastern Afghanistan."
"In the Indian civilization birch-bark, along with dried palm leaves, replaced parchment as the primary writing medium. The oldest known Buddhist manuscripts (some of the Gandharan Buddhist Texts), from Afghanistan, were written on birch bark."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birch_bark
Dominik Wujastyk, University of Vienna, August 2001, rev. October 2011, Indian Manuscripts; Author's pre-publication, pre-edited draft. To appear in: Jorg Quenzer and Jan-Ulrich Sobisch (eds.), Manuscript Cultures: Mapping the Field (Berlin: De Gruyter, scheduled for November 2012).Studies in Manuscript Cultures, volume 1. http://www.degruyter.de/cont/fb/ph/detailEn.cfm?id=IS-9783110225624-1
Peter Monaghan, 2006, 'Birch-Bark manuscripts could reveal when Buddhism moved to China' The Chronicle of Higher Education 52: A22.
http://chronicle.com/article/Birch-Bark-Manuscripts-Coul/34632/
Filliozat, Jean. 1947. “Manuscripts on Birch Bark (bhurjapatra) and Their Preservation.” The Indian Archives 1: 102–8.
"...old birch bark manuscript of Munimata- mani-mala which is the earliest known Sharada manuscript discovered so far in Kashmir, assignable on palacographich ground to the 14th century 12. The other early known manuscripts are the birch bark manuscript of Shakuntala 13, birch bark manuscript of the Adi and Sabha Parvan of the Mahabharata and the birch bark manuscript of Kathasarit- sagara,15 all assignable to 16th century." The Sharada Script: Origin and Developmentby B. K. Kaul Deambi
This is a sensational discovery of a bark manuscript with Indus script (See embedded document). In a lucidly argued thesis, Lucy Zuber Buehler (2009) demonstrates that the provenanced manuscript does contain writing in Indus script.
"The artefact in question consists of a strip of what would appear to be several thin layers of bark, with seven lines of symbols running across it. A cursory perusal of the approximately 200 symbols, could lead a layperson with a rudimentary knowledge of the Indus script, to propose that the text at hand might have been composed using signs that appear in the Indus script, for some of the most common and well-known Indus signs seem to be present on the bark manuscript. It remains to be seen, however, exactly how many of the graphs on the bark object could be considered attested Indus symbols." (ibid., p. 3)
It is time for the announcers of a prize to settle and pay up the prize money, without waiting for decoding/decipherment/translation of mss.
Kalyanaraman
LucyZuberbuehlerindusscriptmss2009
Note on Indian Manuscripts
"...What, then, really defines an “Indian manuscript?” For most specialists, this expression conjures up the idea of a hand-written document inscribed on paper or palm leaf, in Devanāgarī or one of the other alphabets of South or Central Asia, and typically in the Sanskrit, Tamil or Persian language. But one has to bear in mind that the boundaries of definition are fluid, and that a manuscript from China, written on birch-bark in the Kharoṣṭhī script of Gandhāra and the Middle-Iranian language called Khotanese, may also be considered, in many respects, an Indian manuscript, for example if it contains a translation of a Sanskrit treatise on Buddhism or ayurveda, or if it was produced in a Buddhist monastery that still had living links with India. It is also important to remember that Islamic culture began to influence India over a thousand years ago, and has left a huge legacy of manuscripts and paintings, especially from the courtly centres of the Sultans and Mughals. Islamic Indian manuscripts are often written in the Persian language and script, but there are also many surviving manuscripts in Arabic and Urdu, written in variant forms of the Perso-Arabic alphabet. The present chapter will focus mainly on Sanskrit and Prakrit manuscripts, which form by far the greatest bulk of surviving manuscript materials in South Asia, and which represent the continuous cultural heritage of India dating back to the second millennium BCE...
Birch bark was the most fragile writing support used widely in early India, being associated especially with Kashmir. Surviving birch bark manuscripts flake and split when handled, and present almost insurmountable problems for the conservator, with encapsulation often being the only recourse...
While wood, cloth, copper and other writing supports were sometimes used, the principle writing supports in India have been birch bark, palm leaf and paper. Papyrus and parchment were unknown, the latter due to the widely-shared Brahman religious concepts of vegetarianism and harmlessness to living creatures (Skt. ahiṃsā). Broadly speaking, in the north and west of the subcontinent, early manuscripts were written on scrolls made of the bark of the birch tree, flattened, glued into sheets and cut to scrolls or to sheets. Kashmir was a noted source of the manufacture of this material, which was also exported to Central Asia and south to the Panjab. Birch bark was still being used for manuscript production as late as the seventeenth century. Writing on the smooth, flat surface of birch bark was done with ink and a stylus, and the horizontal and vertical strokes could be emphasized calligraphically. This technique carried over to palm leaf and later to paper, after its widespread introduction in the early second millennium AD. The most common script used on birch bark manuscripts is Śāradā." (Dominik Wujaystik, opcit.)
wujastyk-indian-manuscripts-minorupdate1
Kalyanaraman
Member, Action Committee Against Corruption in India (ACACI)
Bhagwan Singh
Nov 18, 2011, 7:13:20 AM11/18/11
to bvpar...@googlegroups.com
| We should test and examine before we make conclusive statements. Asko Parpola is a great scholar with the dubious distinction of having not been able to decipher even a single seal despite numerous conjectural articles and a beautiful non-speaking book. His biases are well known. Even so his doubts must be set aside not by opinion poll but by scientifically testing the manuscript. His haste in making a final remark was unwarranted. The cases cited by him were of different nature to be sold as antique pieces. None of them was presented as a research work which prima facie was found genuine by his examiners, but yet we must wait for a further scientific scrutiny before making loud claims. Forgery has a dubious history in the West. Even Sanskrit language literature at one stage could be pronounced as a forgery by notorious
Brahmins of India. Investigate before totally rejecting it. --- On Thu, 17/11/11, S. Kalyanaraman <kaly...@gmail.com> wrote: |
|
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