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Art and Technique of Presentation of Manuscripts
966
wooden boards or wooden tablets (Phalva) – semetines wooden boards tablets made of sandal wood, -- skims : it is hazardous to think skim or hids as a Haidu writers material because of its being considered : impure, it was used for official documents, cottoncloth (pata, patika, karpasikapara) silk-cloth. Kadatam is a kind of cloth used by canarese traders; birch-bark (bhavya-patra) or the inner birch-bark of the Bhurjatree, palm leaves which are of two types (a) corypha umbravali fare and (b) Borassus flabellifere. The former is hidigneous to India and the latter is probably introduced from Africa; aguru-patra (alve-bank); and paper; the quality of the paper is an indicator to the age of the ms.
Link seems to have been used for writing purpose from very early times. It may be from the himself Indus valley civilisation, as a threiomorphic jar from Mohenjo-Daro is interpreted as an ink-well. The ink used may be black or coloured. Ink and its contents are important, when used as a writing material on leaf-mss and paper-mss. In addition to chalk, which was used for writing on wooden-boards, red lead and minimum hingula are amongst the Rubshitates for ink, the lekhant is an instrument of writing and this includes stitus, pencils, brushes, reed, wooden pens, etc.
The aforegoing brief survey of writing materials can be classified into two broad categories : (i) material which is not easily perishable like stone, etc. and (b) easily perishable material like paper mss, leaf-mss, etc. They contain mostly the literary works etc. We are
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