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56-689: The Egerton Collection is a collection of historical manuscripts held in the British Library . The core of the collection comprises 67 manuscripts bequeathed to the British Museum in 1829 by Francis Henry Egerton, 8th Earl of Bridgewater , along with £12,000 (the Bridgewater fund). To this sum a further £3000 (the Farnborough Fund) was added in 1838 by Egerton's cousin, Charles Long, 1st Baron Farnborough . The income from

112-466: A distinctive long rectangular shape, were used dating back to the 5th century BCE or earlier, and in some cases continued to be used until the 19th century. In China, bamboo and wooden slips were used prior to the introduction of paper . In Russia, birch bark documents as old as from the 11th century have survived. Paper spread from China via the Islamic world to Europe by the 14th century, and by

168-744: A manuscript is called facsimile . Digital reproductions can be called (high-resolution) scans or digital images . Before the inventions of printing, in China by woodblock and in Europe by movable type in a printing press , all written documents had to be both produced and reproduced by hand. In the west, manuscripts were produced in form of scrolls ( volumen in Latin) or books ( codex , plural codices ). Manuscripts were produced on vellum and other parchment, on papyrus , and on paper. In Indian Subcontinent and Southeast Asia , palm leaf manuscripts , with

224-407: A manuscript, or script for short, is an author's or dramatist's text, used by a theatre company or film crew during the production of the work's performance or filming. More specifically, a motion picture manuscript is called a screenplay; a television manuscript, a teleplay; a manuscript for the theatre, a stage play; and a manuscript for audio-only performance is often called a radio play, even when

280-464: A metal stylus. In the Philippines , for example, as early as 900 AD, specimen documents were not inscribed by stylus, but were punched much like the style of today's dot-matrix printers . This type of document was rare compared to the usual leaves and bamboo staves that were inscribed. However, neither the leaves nor paper were as durable as the metal document in the hot, humid climate. In Burma ,

336-758: A proscription on birch to Lugh, warning him; the text of this proscription can be found in the Book of Ballymote . The first letter of Ogham is beith ; beithe means "birch". Buddhist manuscripts written in the Gāndhārī language are likely the oldest extant Indic texts, dating to approximately the 1st century CE. They were written on birch bark and stored in clay jars. The British Library acquired them in 1994. They were written in Kharoṣṭhī and were believed to have originated from Afghanistan , because similar birch bark manuscripts had been discovered in eastern Afghanistan. Since 1994,

392-468: A similar collection of Gāndhārī texts from the same era, called the Senior collection, has also surfaced. The British Library birch bark manuscripts were in the form of scrolls. They were very fragile and had already been damaged. They measured five to nine inches wide, and consisted of twelve- to eighteen-inch long, overlapping rolls that had been glued together to form longer scrolls. A thread sewn through

448-521: Is Digital Scriptorium , hosted by the University of California at Berkeley . Birch bark document Sanskrit birch bark manuscripts written with Brahmi script have been dated to the first few centuries CE. Several early Sanskrit writers, such as Kālidāsa ( c.  4th century CE ), Sushruta ( c.  3rd century CE ), and Varāhamihira (6th century CE) mention its use for manuscripts. The bark of Betula utilis (Himalayan Birch)

504-583: Is considered to be a vernacular dialect . The letters are of a personal or business character. A few documents include elaborate obscenities. Very few documents are written in Old Church Slavonic and only one in Old Norse . The school exercises and drawings by a young boy named Onfim have drawn much attention. The document numbered 292 from the Novgorod excavations (unearthed in 1957) is

560-422: Is explained by a deep culture layer in Novgorod (up to eight meters, or 25 feet) and heavy waterlogged clay soil which prevents the access of oxygen . Serious excavations in Novgorod started only in 1932, although some attempts had been made in the 19th century. Although their existence was mentioned in some old East Slavic manuscripts (along with a mention of Slavs writing upon "white wood" by Ibn al-Nadim ),

616-711: Is often used by modern academics, especially where the animal has not been established by testing. Merovingian script , or "Luxeuil minuscule", is named after an abbey in Western France, the Luxeuil Abbey , founded by the Irish missionary St Columba c.  590 . Caroline minuscule is a calligraphic script developed as a writing standard in Europe so that the Latin alphabet could be easily recognized by

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672-591: Is still used today in India and Nepal for writing sacred mantras. Russian texts discovered in Veliky Novgorod have been dated to approximately the 9th to 15th century CE. Most of those documents are letters written by various people in the Old Novgorod dialect . The Irish language's native writing system Ogham , sometimes called the "tree alphabet", was traditionally attributed to the god Ogma who wrote

728-810: The Bamiyan Caves . The approximately 3,000 scroll fragments are in Sanskrit or Buddhist Sanskrit, in the Brāhmī script, and date to a period from the 2nd to 8th century CE. The Bower Manuscript is one of the oldest Sanskrit texts on birch bark in the Brāhmī script. It includes several texts covering subjects including a medical treatise and proverbs. It was discovered in Kucha (currently in Aksu Prefecture in Xinjiang , China), an ancient Buddhist kingdom on

784-667: The Dead Sea scrolls make no such differentiation. Manuscripts using all upper case letters are called majuscule , those using all lower case are called minuscule . Usually, the majuscule scripts such as uncial are written with much more care. The scribe lifted his pen between each stroke, producing an unmistakable effect of regularity and formality. On the other hand, while minuscule scripts can be written with pen-lift, they may also be cursive , that is, use little or no pen-lift. Islamic manuscripts were produced in different ways depending on their use and time period. Parchment (vellum)

840-402: The Latin : manūscriptum (from manus , hand and scriptum from scribere , to write ). The study of the writing (the "hand") in surviving manuscripts is termed palaeography (or paleography). The traditional abbreviations are MS for manuscript and MSS for manuscripts, while the forms MS. , ms or ms. for singular, and MSS. , mss or mss. for plural (with or without

896-539: The University of Timbuktu in Mali . Major U.S. repositories of medieval manuscripts include: Many European libraries have far larger collections. Because they are books, pre-modern manuscripts are best described using bibliographic rather than archival standards. The standard endorsed by the American Library Association is known as AMREMM. A growing digital catalog of pre-modern manuscripts

952-774: The middens of Oxyrhynchus or secreted for safe-keeping in jars and buried ( Nag Hammadi library ) or stored in dry caves ( Dead Sea scrolls ). Volcanic ash preserved some of the Roman library of the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum . Manuscripts in Tocharian languages , written on palm leaves, survived in desert burials in the Tarim Basin of Central Asia. Ironically, the manuscripts that were being most carefully preserved in

1008-689: The 16th century. A fragment of a birch bark scroll in Sanskrit, in the Brāhmī script , was part of the British Library Gandhara scroll collection. It is presumed to be from North India, dating to sometime during the first few centuries CE. Birch bark manuscripts in Brāhmī script were discovered in an ancient Buddhist monastery in Jaulian , near Taxila in the Punjab in Pakistan, and dated to

1064-601: The 20th century, most notably by victims of the repressions of the Soviet Stalinist regime. People in Soviet forced settlements and GULAG camps in Siberia used strips of birch bark to write letters to their loved ones back home, due to inaccessibility of paper. In 2023 birch bark letters from Siberia Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine, applied to include birch bark letters from Siberia (1945-1965) in

1120-500: The 5th century CE. The Bakhshali manuscript consists of seventy birch bark fragments written in Sanskrit and Prakrit, in the Śāradā script . Based on the language and content, it is estimated to be from the 2nd to 3rd century CE. The text discusses various mathematical techniques. A large collection of birch bark scrolls were discovered in Afghanistan during the civil war in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, possibly in

1176-475: The Bible came scores of commentaries. Commentaries were written in volumes, with some focusing on just single pages of scripture. Across Europe, there were universities that prided themselves on their biblical knowledge. Along with universities, certain cities also had their own celebrities of biblical knowledge during the medieval period. A book of hours is a type of devotional text which was widely popular during

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1232-718: The Carolingian script, giving it proportion and legibility. This new revision of the Caroline minuscule was called English Protogothic Bookhand. Another script that is derived from the Caroline Minuscule was the German Protogothic Bookhand. It originated in southern Germany during the second half of the 12th century. All the individual letters are Caroline; but just as with English Protogothic Bookhand it evolved. This can be seen most notably in

1288-561: The Devīkavaca text, a hymn praising the goddess Durga , were thought to protect the person who carries them from evil influences like an amulet or charm. An example of one of these texts in Devanagari script from Nepal is held at Cambridge University Library (MS Add. 1578). Birch bark is still used in some parts of India and Nepal for writing sacred mantras . This practice was first mentioned c.  8th or 9th century CE, in

1344-657: The Dharmaguptaka sect and probably "represent a random but reasonably representative fraction of what was probably a much larger set of texts preserved in the library of a monastery of the Dharmaguptaka sect in Nagarāhāra ", according to Richard Salomon. The collection includes a variety of known commentaries and sutras, including a Dhammapada , discourses of Shakyamuni Buddha that include the Rhinoceros Sutra , avadānas , and abhidharma texts. The condition of

1400-806: The Lakshmi Tantra. In Indian sculpture, a birch bark manuscript is easily identified by the droop. A palm leaf manuscript is stiff. On July 26, 1951, during excavations in Novgorod , an expedition led by Artemiy Artsikhovsky discovered the first birch bark manuscripts in Russia in a stratigraphic layer dated to around the year 1400. Since then, more than 1,000 similar documents were discovered in Staraya Russa , Smolensk , Polatsk , Vitebsk , Mstsislaw , Torzhok , Pskov , Tver , Moscow , Ryazan , and Vologda , although Novgorod remains by far

1456-568: The Middle Ages. They are the most common type of surviving medieval illuminated manuscripts . Each book of hours contain a similar collection of texts, prayers , and psalms but decoration can vary between each and each example. Many have minimal illumination, often restricted to ornamented initials , but books of hours made for wealthier patrons can be extremely extravagant with full-page miniatures . These books were used for owners to recite prayers privately eight different times, or hours, of

1512-696: The arm of the letter h. It has a hairline that tapers out by curving to the left. When first read the German Protogothic h looks like the German Protogothic b. Many more scripts sprang out of the German Protogothic Bookhand. After those came Bastard Anglicana, which is best described as: The coexistence in the Gothic period of formal hands employed for the copying of books and cursive scripts used for documentary purposes eventually resulted in cross-fertilization between these two fundamentally different writing styles. Notably, scribes began to upgrade some of

1568-551: The beginning of this text coming from the Abby of Saint-Martin at Tours . Caroline Minuscule arrived in England in the second half of the 10th century. Its adoption there, replacing Insular script , was encouraged by the importation of continental European manuscripts by Saints Dunstan , Aethelwold , and Oswald . This script spread quite rapidly, being employed in many English centres for copying Latin texts. English scribes adapted

1624-805: The bequests is devoted to the purchase of further manuscripts, which are added to the original collection. This means that the Egerton series, unlike most other named series of manuscripts held by the Library, remains open to new accessions. This article about a manuscript is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . This British Library -related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Manuscript A manuscript (abbreviated MS for singular and MSS for plural) was, traditionally, any document written by hand or typewritten , as opposed to mechanically printed or reproduced in some indirect or automated way. More recently,

1680-464: The codex format (as in a modern book), which had replaced the scroll by Late Antiquity . Parchment or vellum , as the best type of parchment is known, had also replaced papyrus , which was not nearly so long lived and has survived to the present almost exclusively in the very dry climate of Egypt , although it was widely used across the Roman world. Parchment is made of animal skin, normally calf, sheep, or goat, but also other animals. With all skins,

1736-715: The collection, in accordance with national and international content standards such as DACS and ISAD(G) . In other contexts, however, the use of the term "manuscript" no longer necessarily means something that is hand-written. By analogy a typescript has been produced on a typewriter. In book, magazine, and music publishing, a manuscript is an autograph or copy of a work, written by an author, composer or copyist. Such manuscripts generally follow standardized typographic and formatting rules, in which case they can be called fair copy (whether original or copy). The staff paper commonly used for handwritten music is, for this reason, often called "manuscript paper". In film and theatre,

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1792-432: The cursive scripts. A script that has been thus formalized is known as a bastard script (whereas a bookhand that has had cursive elements fused onto it is known as a hybrid script). The advantage of such a script was that it could be written more quickly than a pure bookhand; it thus recommended itself to scribes in a period when demand for books was increasing and authors were tending to write longer texts. In England during

1848-461: The day. Along with Bibles, large numbers of manuscripts made in the Middle Ages were received in Church . Due to the complex church system of rituals and worship these books were the most elegantly written and finely decorated of all medieval manuscripts. Liturgical books usually came in two varieties. Those used during mass and those for divine office. Most liturgical books came with a calendar in

1904-623: The discovery of birch bark documents ( Russian : берестяна́я гра́мота , berestyanáya grámota , and also grámota in those documents) significantly changed the understanding of the cultural level and language spoken by the East Slavs between the 11th and 15th centuries. Over two hundred styluses have also been found, mostly made of iron , some of bone or bronze . According to historians Valentin Yanin and Andrey Zaliznyak , most documents are ordinary letters by various people written in what

1960-546: The early centuries of the Christian era , manuscripts were written without spaces between the words ( scriptio continua ), which makes them especially hard for the untrained to read. Extant copies of these early manuscripts written in Greek or Latin and usually dating from the 4th century to the 8th century, are classified according to their use of either all upper case or all lower case letters . Hebrew manuscripts, such as

2016-479: The edges helped to hold them together. The script was written in black ink. The manuscripts were written on both sides of the scrolls, beginning at the top on one side, continuing with the scroll turned over and upside down, so that the text concluded at the top and back of the scroll. The longest intact scroll from the British Library collection is eighty-four inches long. The texts were likely compiled by

2072-447: The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, many books were written in the script known as Bastard Anglicana. From ancient texts to medieval maps, anything written down for study would have been done with manuscripts. Some of the most common genres were bibles, religious commentaries, philosophy, law and government texts. " The Bible was the most studied book of the Middle Ages". The Bible was the center of medieval religious life. Along with

2128-562: The front. This served as a quick reference point for important dates in Jesus' life and to tell church officials which saints were to be honored and on what day. In the context of library science , a manuscript is defined as any hand-written item in the collections of a library or an archive. For example, a library's collection of hand-written letters or diaries is considered a manuscript collection. Such manuscript collections are described in finding aids, similar to an index or table of contents to

2184-523: The full stop, all uppercase or all lowercase) are also accepted. The second s is not simply the plural; by an old convention, a doubling of the last letter of the abbreviation expresses the plural, just as pp. means "pages". A manuscript may be a codex (i.e. bound as a book ), a scroll , or bound differently or consist of loose pages. Illuminated manuscripts are enriched with pictures, border decorations, elaborately embossed initial letters or full-page illustrations. The mechanical reproduction of

2240-515: The kammavaca, Buddhist manuscripts, were inscribed on brass, copper or ivory sheets, and even on discarded monk robes folded and lacquered. In Italy some important Etruscan texts were similarly inscribed on thin gold plates: similar sheets have been discovered in Bulgaria . Technically, these are all inscriptions rather than manuscripts. In the Western world, from the classical period through

2296-554: The late 15th century had largely replaced parchment for many purposes there. When Greek or Latin works were published, numerous professional copies were sometimes made simultaneously by scribes in a scriptorium , each making a single copy from an original that was declaimed aloud. The oldest written manuscripts have been preserved by the perfect dryness of their Middle Eastern resting places, whether placed within sarcophagi in Egyptian tombs, or reused as mummy -wrappings, discarded in

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2352-402: The libraries of antiquity are virtually all lost. Papyrus has a life of at most a century or two in relatively humid Italian or Greek conditions; only those works copied onto parchment, usually after the general conversion to Christianity, have survived, and by no means all of those. Originally, all books were in manuscript form. In China, and later other parts of East Asia, woodblock printing

2408-675: The literate class from different regions. It was used in the Holy Roman Empire between approximately 800 and 1200. Codices, classical and Christian texts, and educational material were written in Carolingian minuscule throughout the Carolingian Renaissance . The script developed into blackletter and became obsolete, though its revival in the Italian renaissance forms the basis of more recent scripts. In Introduction to Manuscript Studies , Clemens and Graham associate

2464-547: The most prolific source of them. In Ukraine, birch bark documents were found in Zvenyhorod , Volynia ; while those from Belarus was unearthed in Vitebsk . The contents of the birch bark writings included not only religious writings but also document death of princes, conclusions of peace, dignitary arrivals, folk verses and local proverbs, even casual doodles. While legal related matters include accusations, witnesses and

2520-603: The northern Silk Road , and is estimated to be from around 450 CE. The Gilgit Manuscripts were Buddhist texts discovered in the Gilgit area of Pakistan in 1931 and include various sutras, including the Lotus Sutra , along with folk tales, medicine, and philosophy. They are dated to approximately the 5th to 6th centuries AD, and were written in Buddhist Sanskrit in the Śāradā script . Manuscripts containing

2576-1574: The oldest known document in any Finnic language. It is dated to the beginning of the 13th century. The language used in the document is thought to be an archaic form of the language spoken in Olonets Karelia , a dialect of the Karelian language . For details and full text, see Birch bark letter no. 292 . Novgorod birch-bark letter №366, about 1360-1380 A.D. Case of trampled wheat, release. Original text (with added word division): сь урѧдѣсѧ ѧковь съ гюргьмо и съ харѣтономъ по бьсудьнои грамотѣ цто былъ возѧлъ гюргѣ грамоту в ызьѣжьнои пьшьнѣцѣ а харѣтоно во проторѣхо своѣхъ и возѧ гюрьгѣ за вьсь то рубьль и трѣ грѣвоны и коробью пьшьнѣцѣ а харѣтонъ возѧ дьсѧть локотъ сукона и грѣвону а боль не надобѣ гюрьгю нѣ харѣтону до ѧкова нѣ ѧкову до гюргѧ нѣ до харитона а на то рѧдьцѣ и послусѣ давыдъ лукѣнъ сынъ и сьтьпанъ таишѣнъ Translation (with explanations in square brackets): Here, Yakov has settled with Gyurgiy and with Khariton by courtless deed Gyurgiy has gotten [ at court ] concerning trampled [ by horses ] wheat and Khariton concerning his loss. Gyurgiy got one rouble [ money ], three grivnas [ money ], and basket [ measure ] of wheat for all that, and Khariton got ten cubits of cloth and one grivna. And Gyurgiy and Khariton have no more concern to Yakov, nor Yakov to Gyurgiy and Khariton. And arrangers and perceivers to that are Davyd, son of Luka, and Stepan Taishin. There are birch bark letters written in

2632-716: The population organized around the NGO "Sauvegarde et valorisation des manuscrits pour la défense de la culture islamique" (SAVAMA-DCI). Some 350,000 manuscripts were transported to safety, and 300,000 of them were still in Bamako in 2022. An international consultation on the safeguarding, accessibility and promotion of ancient manuscripts in the Sahel was held at the UNESCO office in Bamako in 2020. Most surviving pre-modern manuscripts use

2688-482: The procedure of evidence, payments and fines, theft, fraud as well as wife-beating. One mundane personal writing reads "Sell the house and come to Smolensk or Kiev; bread is cheap; if you cannot come, write to me about your health. The document №752 stratigraphically dated as 1080–1100 AD is a passionate letter of an abandoned young woman torn in two and thrown away (by her addressee?). The late discovery of birch documents, as well as their amazing state of preservation,

2744-556: The quality of the finished product is based on how much preparation and skill was put into turning the skin into parchment. Parchment made from calf or sheep was the most common in Northern Europe, while civilizations in Southern Europe preferred goatskin. Often, if the parchment is white or cream in color and veins from the animal can still be seen, it is calfskin. If it is yellow, greasy or in some cases shiny, then it

2800-418: The recorded performance is disseminated via non-radio means. In insurance, a manuscript policy is one that is negotiated between the insurer and the policyholder, as opposed to an off-the-shelf form supplied by the insurer. About 300,000 Latin, 55,000 Greek, 30,000 Armenian and 12,000 Georgian medieval manuscripts have survived. National Geographic estimates that 700,000 African manuscripts have survived at

2856-749: The scrolls indicates that they were already in poor condition and fragments by the time they were stored in the clay jars. Scholars concluded that the fragmented scrolls were given a ritual interment, much like Jewish texts stored in a genizah . The bark of Betula utilis (Himalayan Birch) has been used for centuries in India for writing scriptures and texts in various scripts. Its use was especially prevalent in historical Kashmir . Use of bark as paper has been mentioned by early Sanskrit writers such as Kalidasa ( c.  4th century CE ), Sushruta ( c.  3rd century CE ), and Varahamihira (6th century CE). In Kashmir, early scholars recounted that all of their books were written on Himalayan birch bark until

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2912-469: The term has come to be understood to further include any written, typed, or word-processed copy of an author's work, as distinguished from the rendition as a printed version of the same. Before the arrival of prints, all documents and books were manuscripts. Manuscripts are not defined by their contents, which may combine writing with mathematical calculations, maps, music notation , explanatory figures, or illustrations. The word "manuscript" derives from

2968-486: The typewriter in the late 19th century. Because of the likelihood of errors being introduced each time a manuscript was copied, the filiation of different versions of the same text is a fundamental part of the study and criticism of all texts that have been transmitted in manuscript. In Southeast Asia , in the first millennium, documents of sufficiently great importance were inscribed on soft metallic sheets such as copperplate , softened by refiner's fire and inscribed with

3024-586: Was a common way to produce manuscripts. Manuscripts eventually transitioned to using paper in later centuries with the diffusion of paper making in the Islamic empire. When Muslims encountered paper in Central Asia, its use and production spread to Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and North Africa during the 8th century. 4,203 of Timbuktu's manuscripts were burned or stolen during the armed conflict in Mali between 2012 and 2013. 90% of these manuscripts were saved by

3080-412: Was made from sheepskin. Vellum comes from the Latin word vitulinum which means "of calf"/ "made from calf". For modern parchment makers and calligraphers, and apparently often in the past, the terms parchment and vellum are used based on the different degrees of quality, preparation and thickness, and not according to which animal the skin came from, and because of this, the more neutral term "membrane"

3136-515: Was used for books from about the 7th century. The earliest dated example is the Diamond Sutra of 868. In the Islamic world and the West, all books were in manuscript until the introduction of movable type printing in about 1450. Manuscript copying of books continued for a least a century, as printing remained expensive. Private or government documents remained hand-written until the invention of

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