Manuscripts in Time

How old are the surviving manuscripts of the Compendium of Suśruta?

Out of the approximately 220 surviving manuscripts of the work, forty-five, or 20%, are dated. The following chart shows the frequency of these dated manuscripts across time.

The most striking result is the gap between the oldest manuscript (878 CE) and all the rest. This lone manuscript, Kathmandu KL 699, is truly an outlier. It gives us physical evidence for the state of the Compendium of Suśruta over a thousand years before the present, and half a millennium before the next-oldest known manuscript. It is hard to overstate the importance of KL 699 for the history of medicine. Suśruta Project 1.0 provided a complete digital facsimile and diplomatic transcription of KL 699 as well as further critical editions and translations of selected parts of the work transmitted by this manuscript.

The second striking observation is the high number of manuscripts from 1750. This is slightly earlier than one would expect. If one examines a statistically large sample of dated Sanskrit manuscripts, the peak date is 1830 CE. There are two reasons for this. First, older manuscripts from the seventeenth, sixteenth and earlier centuries have physically decayed and disappeared. The average life of a paper manuscript is approximately two to three hundred years. This fact scooped out the graph before 1830. Secondly, the printing press gained increasing dominance in India during the nineteenth century, pushing aside handwritten manuscript production and the profession of scribe. This scooped out the graph after 1830. With regard to the present graph, one has to remember that the statistical population is very small and the results are correspondingly approximate.

One more observation needs to be made. The 80% of Compendium manuscripts that are not explicitly dated may - on closer examination - turn out to be dated or at least datable. Efforts are ongoing to obtain copies of all the known manuscripts of the Compendium of Suśruta.