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Palm leaf manuscripts are manuscripts made out of dried palm leaves. They served as the paper of the ancient world in parts of Asia as far back as the fifteenth century BC.[1] They were used to record actual and mythical narratives in South Asia and in South East Asia. Initially knowledge was passed down orally, but after the invention of alphabets and their diffusion to South Asia, people eventually began to write it down in dried palm leaves of Palmyra palm or talipot palm.
Once written down, each document had a limited time before which the document had to be copied onto new sets of dried palm leaves. With the spreading of Indian culture to South East Asian countries such as Thailand, Cambodia and Indonesia, these nations became home to collections of documents in palm leaf. With the introduction of printing presses in the early 19th century this cycle of copying from palm leaves came to an end. Many governments are making efforts to preserve what is left of their palm leaf documents. [2][3]
In 1997 The United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) recognised the Tamil Medical Manuscript Collection as part of the Memory of the World Register.
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