Sanskrit Friday

November 2, 2012 by lelgin | Comments Off on Sanskrit Friday

I was lucky today to work with two Sanskrit scholars, Peter Scharf and Susan Moore (both affiliated with the Sanskrit Library), to photograph some missing leaves in our palm leaf manuscripts digitization project. Palm leaf manuscripts are actually just what they sound like: they are manuscripts made from dried palm leaves, onto which scribes would etch the lettering and then apply dry ink, often black soot, over the etched letters. This practice is more than 2,000 years old, although with the need to recopy the leaves due to condition problems, many leaves we see today are much younger. The manuscripts are in sections, and each section is bound together with cord that runs through holes in each leaf. Our visiting scholars helped determine which leaves we needed to photograph (some of the manuscripts are in Sanskrit, some in Telugu), disassembled the manuscripts, and ensured that the leaves remained intact and in order.

Here’s an example of a typical palm leaf from these manuscripts (with color targets, which we include for our archival copies):

Some of these manuscripts are centuries old, and bear the marks of their age. The below manuscript shows that the leaf was partially eaten, presumably by a worm:

Another issue we run into with the manuscripts are leaves that have not been inked – when the leaf was etched by the scribe, but ink was never added to the etching. Here’s an example (at 100% magnification) of two separate palm leaves. One has been inked, while the other has only been etched. To be able to capture this properly, I had to tilt one of our lights at a very low angle to the manuscript, so that the raking light would fill the embossed letters and make them legible.

Although challenging, these manuscripts were fun to photograph. Part of what makes this work so interesting is the wide variety of materials we have, and the scholars, curators, and researchers that we get to work with.