[INDOLOGY] pre-lined mss.

[Péter-Dániel Szántó]

Dear colleagues,

I would like to try out an idea, especially since we have some black-belt
codicologists here.

I noticed that in the mediaeval East Indian ms. corpus, we have a larger
amount of pre-lined mss. among those dated to Pāla regnal years than the
ones dated in the Nepalese style.

Perhaps I should explain: by pre-lined I mean primarily two double lines
separating the margins and the string space(/s) on each side. Secondarily,
the guideline for the sūtra to help maintain lines parallel to the edges.
Something like this:


​
My survey is not at all exhaustive, and, as I said before, this practice is
not unheard of in Nepal. However, it starts in the Pāla realm a little
before 1000 CE and continues steadily up to the very end, whereas in Nepal
it seems to begin only in the early 12th c. My hypothesis for the time
being is that the Nepalese were emulating this habit. Also note that the
script in these cases is usually what is referred to as 'rañjanā' or
simplified versions thereof. Ok, this last point sounds muddled, but I
think that the palaeography for this corpus is pretty weak.

Any comments would be greatly appreciated, especially if you can point me
to some secondary literature on the subject.

Best wishes,

Peter Szant2


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://list.indology.info/pipermail/indology/attachments/20170512/9f1e3edc/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: lined.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 81462 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://list.indology.info/pipermail/indology/attachments/20170512/9f1e3edc/attachment.jpg>