Palaeography

The following directly-accessible resources supplement the better-known print materials by Bühler, Dani and others.

Character charts from manuscripts in China

• Akṣara List of the Manuscripts of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā and Buddhapālita’s Commentary (ca. 550-650 CE, Collection of Sanskrit Mss. Formerly Preserved in the China Ethnic Library)
• Akṣara List of the Manuscript of the Saddharmapuṇḍarīkasūtra (1082 CE, Collection of Sanskrit Mss. Formerly Preserved in the China Ethnic Library).
• Further akṣara-charts from the China Ethnic Library.

Printed reference works

• Cecil Bendall’s chart of Nepalese letter-numerals from manuscripts of the ninth century upwards.
• Cecil Bendall’s chart of Nepalese letters from manuscripts of the ninth century upwards.
• Cecil Bendall’s Palaeographical Introduction
• Bidur Bhattarai, Dividing Texts: Conventions of Visual Text-Organisation in Nepalese and North Indian Manuscripts (De Gruyter, 2020). Open access.
• Einicke, Katrin. 2014. Korrektur, Differenzierung und Abkürzung in indischen Inschriften und Handschriften. Harrassowitz Verlag. http://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=1691626.

Newa script Unicode notes and standards

• Unicode Consortium. 2020. The Unicode Standard 13.0, NewaRange: 11400–1147F. https://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U11400.pdf.

• Pandey, Anshuman. 2012. Proposal to Encode the Newar Script in ISO/IEC 10646. ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 N4184L2/12-003R2012-02-29. Michigan, USA. https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2012/12003r-newar.pdf. A particularly useful document with manuscript illustrations and discussion of paratextual elements like puṣpikās and siddhir astu symbols.

Software tools

• Indoskript, an online a paleographic database of Brahmi and Kharosthi – derived scripts.
• Quick Palaeographer, by Charles Li, is an aid while learning the palaeography of a new manuscript. This enables one rapidly to build up an indexed and clickable repertoire of letter-forms from a manscrupt image.