Dénesi Tamás (szerk.): Collectanea Sancti Martini - A Pannonhalmi Főapátság Gyűjteményeinek Értesítője 8. (Pannonhalma, 2020)
II. Gyűjteményeinkből
136 Kiss Dániel Udaya Kumar, D. – Sreekumar, G. V. – Athvankar, U. A. (2009), Traditional Writing System in Southern India: Palm Leaf Manuscripts, Design Thoughts, 2, 2–7. Wenzlhuemer, Roland (2008), Coffee and Tea Cultivation in Ceylon, 1880–1900: An Economic and Social History, Leiden–New York (Brill’s Indological Library 40). Wijesinha, Sam (2009), Felix in Parliament and at Parliamentary Conferences, Daily News (Colombo), 26 June 2009. Dániel Kiss A Sinhalese manuscript in Pannonhalma The Archives of the Abbey of Pannonhalma conserve a hitherto unidentified manuscript (see images 1–2). The writing material is a rectangular sheet of an unknown, creamcoloured substance with a densely veined surface, measuring 360 x 60 mm; in the middle there is a roughly circular hole of c. 6 mm diameter. A fold that runs across this hole, parallel with the short edges, divides the sides into two fields each of which contains a column of nine (or in one case, ten) lines of writing running parallel to the long edge of the rectangle. The script is thin, black; the characters curly and connected. When I saw this object in 2018, I realized that it must be a palm leaf manuscript. Photographs of other palm leaf manuscripts available online confirmed my hypothesis on account of the script and especially the shape of the object, an elon gated rectangle with a hole in the middle, through which several leaves were threaded together. Dried and specially treated palm leaves were used as a writing material in and around the Indian subcontinent. The leaves were either written on with a brush, or in pen and ink (in northern India) or incised with a sharp iron stylus and then rubbed in with soot or coal powder in order to let the incised writing stand out (in the south of the subcontinent). This manuscript was prepared with the second technique. Further research revealed that its script is Sinhala. Dr Amal Gunasena (SOAS) kindly read the text for me, when we studied images of the manuscript together in London in 2019. He observed that the manuscript was copied in British Ceylon in the late 19th or the early 20 th century, perhaps in the city of Kandy. The writing is of a fairly high quality; words are not separated. This is the middle leaf of a manuscript that consisted originally of three leaves; the beginning and end of the text have been lost. The text is a stotra , a poetical prayer written in classical Sinhalese, with some sections (including the names of gods and the blessings) in Sanskrit. The prayer asks that a man of high position called Seneviratne mantri should recover from
