"Oh, and bring something to write on!" How many times have you heard that phrase? Did you ever think to bring something other than paper? Of course not! That's what paper is for! Not once did it even cross my mind to bring a clay tablet or an animal skin, but originally, that's what people wrote on! People used the resources that they had at hand. And for India, that meant palm fronds.
By some estimates, palm leaf books originated in India around fifteenth century BC. Tree leaves were used to record important documents like Buddhist scriptures, law, biographical information, and Sanskrit literature. 
Palm leaves are flattened, dried and smoothed in preparation to make a book. Letters are inscribed by using a needle-like instrument that cuts into the surface. The writing is not all that visible before it is covered over with soot or pigment mixed with oil. They can then be illustrated (some with intricate paintings) and strung together. Two holes are bored though the center of the leaves to bind the book together with a cord. ChinaView shows the process of creating a palm leaf book with a series of pictures. (I highly recommend it!) |
| Colombia University is trying to identify this text. |
Unfortunately, these beautiful books decay rapidly. We have very few surviving copies of palm frond books and those that we have really aren't all that old. Some of them remain untranslated. Colombia University has requested help online to identify and translate an old text written on palm fronds. Even today it is hard to translate some of these old languages because they simply are no longer in use. We lament the loss of these wonderfully crafted texts. I suppose that palm book making has been abandoned because of their short shelf life and the difficulty of making them.
What does the future hold? With the advent of e-books, printed books have become increasingly less popular. Now you can carry around an entire library in your bag! I patiently wait for the day that museums will put my text books on display and everyone will marvel over the fact that we wrote on paper. The day is ever near that the phrase "Oh, and bring something to write on" will no longer refer to paper.
It's crazy to think how many different ways there are to create a medium of writing down information. I personally think that this palm frond method is by far the coolest. Probably because it looks so compact and painstakingly made to fit all the information.
ReplyDeleteI wonder how difficult it is to create an entire book since you basically can't see what you're writing until you color it in with the soot or other materials.
Very interesting comment about the future and our textbooks being put in museums to have future students gawk at how absurd it seems to have used paper.
Nice post Jake! I think it's cool to look at how resourceful people are when there isn't such an established norm for something (like a writing medium, or how people made tools out of animal bones). Now we would never think to write on palm fronds, just like how you said that one day it will seem ridiculous for us to have actually written on a physical object rather than having a digital record.
ReplyDeleteTanner your comment reminds me of a Disney show that used to be on. The kid Phil was from the future and he was wicked fast at typing but in his elementary school no one learned how to write by hand anymore because it was no longer needed and was just outdated. What will happen to society when there are no longer physical records of things and only the digital information exists?
ReplyDeleteHaha Montana I remember that show! And to answer your question, I don't think there will be a time when writing (or print) entirely dies out. It's persisted throughout so much of the worlds history and become such a part of our lives that I think there will always be some use for it. I'm sure it will be dominated by digital knowledge, but just like folk knowledge and oral knowledge are still very much alive, I think writing will maintain certain uses too. Just suppose how long it would take the whole world to become entirely digital, and the problems with compatibility between different digital knowledge databases.
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