Birch Bark Manuscript
Birch bark manuscripts are documents written on pieces of the inner layer of birch bark—it was commonly used for writing before the advent of mass production of paper. Evidence of birch bark for writing goes back many centuries and in various cultures.
The oldest dated birch bark manuscripts are numerous Gandhāran Buddhist texts from approximately the 1st century CE, believed to have originated in Afghanistan, likely by the Dharmaguptaka sect. Translations of the texts, mostly from Kharoṣṭhī script, have produced the earliest known versions of significant Buddhist scriptures, including: a Dhammapada, discourses of Buddha that include the Rhinoceros Horn Sutra, Avadanas, and Abhidharma texts. Sanskrit birch bark manuscripts, using Brāhmī script, have been dated to the first few centuries CE. Several early Sanskrit writers, such as Kalidasa (c. 4th century CE), Sushruta (c. 3rd century CE), and Varahamihira (6th century CE) mention the use of birch bark for manuscripts. The bark of Betula utilis (Himalayan Birch) is still used today in India and Nepal for writing sacred mantras.
Russian texts discovered in Novgorod have been dated to approximately the 9th to 15th century CE. Most of those documents are letters written by various people in Old Novgorod dialect.
Read more about Birch Bark Manuscript: Gandhāran Buddhist Manuscripts
Famous quotes containing the words birch, bark and/or manuscript:
“The birch begins to crack its outer sheath
Of baby green and show the white beneath....”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“His life itself passes deeper in nature than the studies of the naturalist penetrate; himself a subject for the naturalist. The latter raises the moss and bark gently with his knife in search of insects; the former lays open logs to their core with his axe, and moss and bark fly far and wide. He gets his living by barking trees. Such a man has some right to fish, and I love to see nature carried out in him.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The manuscript lay like a dust-rag on his desk, and Eitel found, as he had found before, that the difficulty of art was that it forced a man back on his life, and each time the task was more difficult and distasteful.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)