page_title: Palm-leaf manuscript
section_title: Tamil Nadu
hierarchical_section_title: Palm-leaf manuscript / Regional variations / Tamil Nadu
context_page_description: Palm-leaf manuscripts are manuscripts made out of dried palm leaves. Palm leaves were used as writing materials in the South Asia and in Southeast Asia dating back to the 5th century BCE and possibly much earlier. Their use began in South Asia and spread elsewhere, as texts on dried and smoke treated palm leaves of Borassus species or the Ola leaf.
  One of the oldest surviving palm leaf manuscripts of a complete treatise is a Sanskrit Shaivism text from the 9th-century, discovered in Nepal, now preserved at the Cambridge University Library. The Spitzer Manuscript is a collection of palm leaf fragments found in Kizil Caves, China. They are dated to about the 2nd-century CE and are the oldest known philosophical manuscript in Sanskrit.
context_section_description: 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. A very good example of usage of palm leaf manuscripts to store the history is a Tamil grammar book named Tolkāppiyam which was written around 3rd century BCE. A global digitalization project led by the Tamil Heritage Foundation collects, preserves, digitizes and makes ancient palm-leaf manuscript documents available to users via the internet.
caption: 16th-century Christian  prayers in Tamil, on palm leaf manuscripts
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