10 
Dr. Hoemle —Antiquities from Central Asia. [Extra No. 1, 
Shape and Size. 
the case of No. 1 of Set I, it is discoloured and has assumed a dun 
colour. As the paper of these Pothis is not starched, the coating may 
perhaps have been intended to prevent the ink from running. In many 
places it has peeled off, and with it the writing has disappeared. The 
letters appear to have been traced with some kind of pen, probably 
the Indian reed-pen, not the Chinese brush. This is suggested by the 
shai'p angles and clean-cut lines of the letters, which is particularly 
noticeable in the Pothis, Nos. 3-7 of Set I and Nos. 3-5 of Set II. 
(See Plate II, fig. 3.) 
In the shape and size of the leaves of the Pothis there is much 
variation; but they all agree in being decidedly 
oblong. In this particular, they clearly imi¬ 
tate the Indian palm-leaf. In India two kinds of material were used 
for book-writing, the leaves of the Corypha palm (Corypha umbraculifera) 
and the inner bark of the birch tree (Betula utilis), both in a prepared state. 
Palm-leaf was the common material, employed everywhere throughout 
India : its shape, a decided narrow oblong, was determined by the shape 
of the segments or strips of the natural leaf. Birch-bark was only used 
in the extreme North-West of India, concurrently with palm-leaf; and its 
shape was that of large, squarish sheets. 2 Seeing that the paper was 
made in large squarish sheets (see below, p. 23), and that a narrow 
oblong is a less convenient shape for a writing material than a squarish 
sheet, it is obvious that the practice of cutting up paper into narrow 
oblongs must have been determined by people who were accustomed to 
the Indian use of palm-leaves. As the Bower MSS. show, even birch- 
bark was occasionally treated in this way and cut up into oblongs after 
the model of the Corypha-leaf. The normal size of paper Pothis is 
about 2 (or 2|) by 12 (or 14) inches; see Nos. 3 and 4 of Set I, and 
Nos. 2 and 3 of Set II (Plate II, fig. 4) ; and this is also the normal 
size of a palm-leaf Pothi. But paper, being cut out from very large 
sheets, naturally permitted a much greater variation in shape and size 
than the natural palm-leaf. Hence we have Pothis as small as 2 x 5 or 
2| x 8 inches; see Nos. 1 and 2 of Set I, and No. 1 of Set II. On the 
other hand, there must have been also Pothis of enormous size, as shown 
by No. 5 of Set I, which appears to have had leaves about 11 inches 
broad and proportionately long, and by No. 7 of Set I, the leaves of 
which were 4f inches broad and probably about 20 inches long. In both 
cases the length can only be conjectured ; but a fair idea of the size of 
such an enormous manuscript is afforded by the Petrovsky MS., which, 
2 See my Epigraphical Note on Palm-leaf, Paper and BirchbarJc in Journal, 
Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol. LXIX, p. 93 ff. (1900). 
