1901 .] 
Section III. Manuscripts . 
7 
As to the identity of this site nothing certain is known. Some (Set I, 
Nos. 3, 5, Set II, Nos. 4, 5, 6) are said to have been found in “ an old 
buried town in the vicinity of Kuchar” (Introd., pp. viii, ix). Of the 
rest, all that is known is that they were found “ somewhere in the Takla 
Makan.” Seeing that similar manuscripts were found by Dr. Stein in 
the sand-buried houses of Dandan Uiliq, N.E. of Khotan in the Takla 
Makan, it is not improbable that the Pothis in question also originally 
came from that place. 
A Pothi consists of a number of leaves, cut of a practically uniform 
. . oblong shape, generally enclosed between two 
DOQQltlODt 1 -i i Till* •. • 
wooden boards, and held m position or 
“ bound ” by a string which passes through a hole drilled through the 
whole pile. This fashion of making up a book is peculiar to India. 
In all Pothis, existing or surviving in India, the hole is placed in the 
middle of the pile of leaves; or there are two holes, at equal distances 
from the margin, in the middle of the right and left halves of the pile. 
On the other hand, in the Pothis from Central Asia there is only one 
hole, which is invariably in the middle of the left half of the pile (see 
Plate II, figs. 1, 4, 5). There are reasons to believe that this was also 
the practice in India in very early times. In the old Indian copper-plate 
grants, the copper leaves are strung together on a copper-ring which 
passes through a hole close to the left margin of the leaves. The 
practice of incising records on metal plates is a very ancient one in 
India: instances of such records on gold plates are already mentioned 
in the Jataka book (see Professor Biililer’s Palaeography in the Cyclopaedia 
of Indo-Aryan Research, p. 90). The practice was afterwards trans¬ 
ferred to manuscript books, when the latter came into vogue. But 
owing to the fragile nature of their material (palm-leaf or birch-bark) 
the hole was naturally placed further away from the margin, about the 
middle of the left half of the leaves. This may be seen in the Bower 
MSS. which is written on birch-bark, and Part II of which belongs to 
the earlier part of the 5th century A.D. Somewhat later, the practice 
arose, for the greater safety of the leaves, to make two holes at corres¬ 
ponding distances from the right and left margin. The earliest examples 
of this practice are presented in the Horiuzi MS. (see Anecdota Oxoni- 
ensia, Yol. I, Part III, Plate I), and in the two Nepalese manuscripts 
of the Cambridge Collection, Nos. 1702 and 1049 (Mr. Bendall’s Cata¬ 
logue, Plate I, figs. 1 and 2), all of which belong to the 6th century A.D. 
Still later arose the practice of replacing the two holes by one hole in 
the middle of the leaves. The existence of this practice is recorded 
by Alberuni in the 11th century, who says (Professor Sachau’s Trans¬ 
lation of Alberuni’s India, Yol. I, p. 171), that “the Indians bind a book 
