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PALAEOGRAPHICAL REMARKS ON THE HORIUZI PALM-LEAF MSS.
I.
PROFESSOR Max Müller's discovery of the Horiusi palm-leaves and the acquisition of trustworthy facsimiles of these documents, which we owe to his sagacity and untiring energy, are events the importance of which for Indian palaeography cannot be estimated too highly. In the first place, the mere fact of their existence puts an end to the doubts and misgivings, entertained by some of the most distinguished Sanskritists, regarding the age of the palm-leaf MSS. found during the last ten years in Nepal and in Western India. Owing to the curse of uncertainty which seems to attach to most historical and literary documents, purely Indian, the possibility, at least, of doubting the age of the palm-leaves, discovered in India, could hitherto not be denied, in spite of the dates which their colophons very frequently exhibit. The objection, raised by Professor A. Weber and Dr. Burnell, that the dates might have been copied from more ancient originals, and that in some cases the fresh look of the palm-leaves favoured such a supposition, was, though not unanswerable, yet sufficiently plausible to remove the manuscripts from the class of the duohoyouuera, and to place them in that of the aurikeyoueva. It was, indeed, possible to answer, as has been ably done by Mr. C. Bendall in his palaeographical introduction to the Catalogue of the Cambridge Collection', that the climate of the places where the finds were made, the tradition and the circumstances of the country, the correctness of the historical and astronomical statements contained in the MSS., and the chain of palaeographical and monumental evidence made their genuineness exceedingly probable. But there was not a single one among them regarding which one could say that its age was guaranteed by trustworthy external evidence, and, therefore, absolutely unassailable. This is the point in which the Horiusi palm-leaves, though undated, are so much superior to all similar documents, and through which they gain a paramount importance for
Catalogue of Buddhist Sanskrit Manuscripts, p. xvii ff.
