Our second reflection kicked off our analysis of the manuscript by focusing on the varieties of script we thought were present on the manuscript (a rather daunting task given that none of us had experience in any of the scripts or languages it contains), as well as on a series of pages dedicated to a table of symbols and numbers, which we later established to be a calendar.
There seems to be at least two writing scripts. In class, we gathered that the script was abugida, meaning there was a constant letter that may or may not have a vowel marking, changing the meaning of the word. After doing some research, Brahmi seemed like the abugida writing system that would best fit the context of the manuscript since we are assuming the manuscript was produced/used somewhere in South or Southeast Asia. While I am unsure, my best guess right now is that the chart is using a Tibetan script / Sanskrit. [Tai Lue script].
There are a few things that make me think it has a strong relationship with Tibetan. On the pages that seem to have only words, there are two main accent signs that stood out to me. The first being a circle above characters and the second being the upside down looking up above characters. Under the Wikipedia page for Tibetan, there seems to be matching accent marks. The second row seems to match the swoosh accent, while the third to last row seems to match the circle (left image). There is also the usage of two slash marks in the sixth row that match as well (right image).
While I personally struggled to really pinpoint what scripts were used, I found this Wikipedia chart of the different Brahmic languages that might be useful.
As for the two-page chart discussed in class, my current assumption is that the chart is an attempt to compare the different dating/calendar systems, in particular the lunar calendar with the Julian calendar. The charting system seems to be not unique for calendars. Below is an Islamic calendar on a manuscript scroll from the 18th century. To me, it looks quite familiar to the Buddhist chart in class, since they both have a defined left column that seems separate from the right and more freehanded.
There are three main ways that provide some evidence that the chart has a cyclical nature to it that makes me think it is some sort of calendar for record keeping.
The first is that there is a set of 7 symbols that continuously repeat throughout the chart, which is similar to the concept of 7 days a week. The second is in the Arabic numeral system. The number before the slash goes up consecutively until it reaches 12 and then restarts at 1 and continues to go up. This reminds me of the fact that there are 12 months in a year. The third is that the number after the \ goes up to 15 and then restarts at 1 and goes up again consecutively. [Though, sometimes the calendar would go up to only 14, which if multiplied by 2, would be 28 like the number of days in February]. I am not sure what this means. Since the calendar has about 30 days a month, the author may be counting two days under one date, so 8/9 covers both Monday and Tuesday and 8/10 covers both Wednesday and Thursday, but then the idea that the symbols correlate with the days of the week would not make much sense anymore.
I currently think that the calendar system may have to do with the lunar calendar system. Looking at the Arabic numbers that look like dates, on the dates with \15, there seems to be some circular shape under the slash that is unique to that date. For example, 8\15 has a circle with a dot in the middle compared to 10\15 that has a circle with parentheses around it. This may represent a certain moon phase the author was observing in the lunar cycle. The calendar would then require intercalation to correlate with the solar calendar again correctly. Thus, the purpose of the manuscript may not just be some sort of form record keeping to compare dating systems, but it may be for the author to intercalate their own calendar system. The lunisolar calendar also had 12 months.
Write about your Interpretation and identification of the two-page chart.
There is sufficient evidence to assume that the chart is dating the cycles of the moon. The numbers on the first column are from 1-31, which may symbolize the days of the month. The symbols in orange and the corresponding six symbols below it repeat in a series (for a total of 7 repeated symbols) which may represent days of the week. Furthermore, we noticed that there were circles in between some of the numbers (as I’ve highlighted below) which may represent depictions of the cycles of the moon. Sources have mentioned that the full moon comes 15 days after the new moon. If one looks at the manuscript, there is an empty circle between 10/15 and 10/1, and there is a full circle between 10/15 and 11/1. I personally believe the numerators in this chart symbolize months of the year, while the denominators are days of the month that count the 15-day interval between the new moon and the full moon.
An image of the chart in mysterious manuscript, with green markings indicating location of new moon or full moon
An image of the modern understanding of the lunar cycle, supporting the 15-day interval interpretation regarding the manuscript’s lunar cycle
Why depictions of the cycles of the moon? Why are they significant in Buddhism?
Scholars mention that the moon symbolizes enlightenment. According to Kenneth Kraft, professor emeritus of Buddhist studies at Lehigh University, the full moon represents our true self. He states “...our true nature is hidden the way a cloud-covered moon is hidden. When the clouds disperse, everything is illuminated. The Buddha is sometimes called ‘the bright moon who illumines the world.’” Given this symbolic tradition of the moon, I believe that the cycles of the moon may be used to predict a) the individual is likely in their purest state on a full moon (the purest state being the state in which the individual is filled with compassion and without feelings of pride or vices against the teachings of Buddhism) or b) when the bodhisattva, the individual who achieves Nirvana but delays this stage to teach humanity Buddha’s wisdom, arrives.
This last interpretation is best supported by the first page of the manuscript, where a mysterious avatar is waving a flag with the three-headed elephant. In traditional Buddhist tales, the white elephant symbolizes purity, and it is also said that the Buddha was born from a white elephant himself. This avatar may be waving a flag to humanity to rejoice the future arrival of a bodhisattva.
Write about your interpretation and identification of the script(s) used in the manuscript.
In terms of the content of this manuscript, it may be talking about a prophecy regarding the future arrival of the bodhisattva or notes regarding how the full moon represents a moment of one’s purity (possessing the virtues that would similarly resemble those that one close to nirvana would have). I argue that this content is regarding either the prophecy or notes on how the moon relates to one’s spiritual enlightenment because of my interpretation of the two-page chart as discussed above.
I identify the script as Khmer. To make this interpretation, I simply researched images of the Lao, Thai, Burmese, and Khmer scripts since it was given that this manuscript is from Southeast Asia. It seems like out of all the scripts, Khmer is the one that has the most intricate swirls (I have inserted an image of the manuscript and an image of the Khmer script from a Yale scholar on Cambodian studies).
In trying to identify the languages, I started from what we know about the manuscript: that this is a mainland Southeast Asian manuscript. Because it uses Arabic numerals, which were popularized around the 15th century, I think it’d be appropriate to look at the writing systems of the region in the 15th century. There’s a long list on this webpage, and I narrowed it down based on the time that the language was used (does it include the 1400s?) and the script type (we’ve noted that the language in the manuscript is likely an abugida script), which left the following options:
That still leaves a lot of options, but some of them were easy to eliminate. For example, the shapes in the script are more self-intersecting than those used in the Lontara script. There are no “x” diacritics, ruling out Baybayin, and the diacritics don’t look like those used in Batak. I also eliminated the two Sudanese scripts, Javanese, Burmese, Tibetan, Kawi (for lack of the “upside down” F symbol), Khmer (because the horizontal diacritics don’t appear in the manuscript). This left the following:
From there, I looked through each of the scripts and tried to locate the character that we identified as marking the chart last Friday. From this, I concluded the language was Lao and the character seems to be ສ. In all honesty, I’m not sure if this is correct. In particular, I’m suspicious because some of the characters have very long tails (see below), and I couldn’t find any examples of written Lao characters which share the same quality. At the same time, if it is Lao, then the first part of the flag on the cover page reads “ຂງ ຂາຣ ໄປ ວັນ ພ ວັພເຊ ຈັພ ປທ …” which translates to “On the day of the Buddha’s birthday …” which seems accurate. (spoiler: it wasn’t accurate)
Another vote in favor of Lao is that I found a modern Lao calendar, and the first row looks like this:
(I added the red circle). The dates circled look a lot like the dates that we see on the first page of the book. The description accompanying the calendar explains that the first date range (2563–64) is a year range in the Buddhist calendar and the second date range (1382–83) is in the Old Lunar calendar. In our book, the numbers are 2491–92 and 1310–11. A Buddhist calendar year seems to overlap with the Gregorian calendar year, and is offset by 543 years (i.e. year 543 in the Buddhist calendar overlaps with 0 CE). This means that this manuscript was likely made in the year 2491 – 543 = 1948.
Moving onto the chart, my first thought was, knowing a little bit about the script, I could translate the header row of the chart, and easily deduce its meaning:
This proved to be quite challenging again, because it seems like the authors used quite a few abbreviations. I think “ນື” is the character in the second column after the date and “ວັພ” or “ວັຟ” is the header of the first column after the date, but that doesn’t really get us anywhere. Those noises don’t mean much to me.
After this endeavor, the most promising approach still seems to be looking at the periodicity in the chart. Given that, I don’t think I have too much more to add. One approach that I, unfortunately, do not have the time to complete right now, would be to look at the letters that appear on the first of every month and try to establish some periodicity there. The lunar calendar is 29.5 days, and each month in the chart seems split into either 14/15 periods or 15/15 periods.
I’ll start off directly with my findings:
I believe that the script used on the cover and on the table pages is Lao
I’m less certain about the script on the rest of the pages. I think there’s a strong chance it’s also Lao, though some of the correspondences between symbols are unclear (this might be due to a quirk of handwriting, however)
I believe that the table on the first few pages is a calendar that records a lunar cycle, the seven-day week, and a ten day Lao week cycle
I’m fairly sure the document dates to 1948-9 CE
Starting with the script on the cover and table, I looked at South Asian scripts and tried to determine which matched. I’m fairly confident that the script we see here is Lao, for a few reasons (other than mere resemblance):
Beneath the image of the rodent on the first page is a series of symbols correspond to the Lao name for the year of the rat:
2. The cycle of seven symbols that runs throughout the table corresponds with the first letter of the seven days of the week in Lao, with the notable exception of Thursday – I’m not sure whether this is due to a quirk in notation, or whether it is simply due to the fact that the symbols for Wednesday and Thursday are the same in Lao, and so something is needed to distinguish them.
Another noteworthy aspect that occurred to me on the cover page was the leftmost date – 2491-92. After some digging (Buddhist calendar - Wikipedia, 2022), this date seems like it would fit reasonably on the Buddhist calendar – which would place years 2491-2 as 1948-9 CE. Compellingly, 1948 is a year of the rat and 1949 is a year of the ox in the Khmer calendar (Khmer Calendar, 2022), facts that seems to fit well with the illustrations of the rat and the ox on the cover, so I think we can be fairly confident of this date. I still have no idea what to make of the date 1310-11.
Another aspect that stood out to me after some looking into information around Buddhist calendars was the importance of a lunar calendar divided into segments of 14 or 15 days. These divisions seem like they line up perfectly with the Arabic numerals on the table page, which run in cycles of 14 or 15.
Lastly, I looked into other forms of recording day cycles in Laos, and I found a paper (by the author of Monks and Magic – B. J. Terwiel!) that notes that “the Laotians used the decimal series… to indicate a regular ten-day week” (Terwiel, 70). Here is a table of the transliteration of that decimal series:
Taking into account the symbols of the ten-unit cycle on the table, and attempting to transliterate them phonetically using the tables below, I came up with a rough resemblance to the ten-day transliterated cycle that Terwiel presents.
While the correspondence is far from certain, it seems to fit too well to be coincidental. I think all of these facts considered, we can be fairly sure that the script used on the cover and the table is Lao (and I think it is likely that the rest is a form of Lao too). It also seems apparent that the table is indeed a form of calendar, and that it records days in a lunar cycle, as well as in the standard seven day week and a decimal week also used in Laos.
Sources:
En.wikipedia.org. 2022. Buddhist calendar - Wikipedia. [online] Available at: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_calendar> [Accessed 15 April 2022].
Laoconnection.com. 2022. Learn Lao Language: Basics - Days of the Week. [online] Available at: <https://www.laoconnection.com/2020/09/learn-lao-language-basics-days-of-week.html> [Accessed 15 April 2022].
Cam-cc.org. 2022. Khmer Calendar. [online] Available at: <https://www.cam-cc.org/calendar/Utility/agetable.php> [Accessed 15 April 2022].
Terwiel, B. J. “Tai Peoples and the Computation of Time, a Comparative Perspective.” Oriens Extremus, vol. 28, no. 1, 1981, pp. 62–106, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24047206. Accessed 15 Apr. 2022.
Omniglot.com. 2022. Lao alphabet, pronunciation and language. [online] Available at: <https://omniglot.com/writing/lao.htm> [Accessed 15 April 2022].
The first thing I noticed when analyzing the manuscript was the cyclical number system going down the columns and progressing left to right. What seems to be dates have a starting number progressing from one to twelve which resembles our modern, roman system of months. This number is followed by a slash in either the forward or backward direction (this seems to be significant), and a second number progressing from one up to fifteen - sometimes fourteen - and then cycling back to one. It looks as if it were recording the twelve months in chunks of fifteen days. It is unclear to me why some cycles end at fourteen. An interesting note is that following
a sequence of fifteen boxes, the first number will either stay the same and its following number will repeat 1-15, or it will increase by one (until reaching twelve) with the second number again cycling through 1-15. In the cases that the beginning number changes, there is a circle - sometimes with a dot in the center - denoting this change. I wonder if this has a connection to the full and new moons as I understand that these are often represented in similar ways. To the right of a column of ‘dates’ are two columns of script. Each box in the grid holds only one symbol with a period following it, indicating that they might represent abbreviations. In the first column, I noticed patterns of seven, where there is a set of seven consecutive symbols that repeats. In the second column, I notice the same thing but in patterns of ten. The cycles of seven remind me of our modern week system and I wonder if the writer was trying to compare two different systems of time-division - one resembling our seven-day week and one that uses ten-day divisions. Another interesting thing is that on the far left side of the pages containing number progressions is a sequence of numbers from one to thirty one. These numbers at first glance seem to label each row but on closer look, don’t always line up with the separations and don’t seem to match the patterns of 15 in any obvious way. Overall, I’m going to guess that the number system as a whole is some type of lunar calendar - if not one, then multiple.
The script is a bit more difficult for me as I do not notice any blaring patterns. It seems as if although the script might remain the same throughout the manuscript, it may be used to represent two different languages. I notice similar curved symbols throughout, with some pages containing more markings above or below the symbols. This indicates to me that either there are two different scripts being used, or there is one script used in one language that contains more vowels perhaps, and one that does not. From my understanding, many writing systems might use symbols to represent a consonant or consonant cluster, and an addition to those same symbols to represent an added vowel sound. These could also be variations between an older and newer version of the same script. This seems very plausible to me as some of the pages of writing contain what look like notes in the margins, indicating that there might have been an original writer, then a second writer adding to the manuscript at a later date. It would account for an older and newer version of script used during different time periods. After comparing the script to previously deciphered Buddhist manuscripts online, I found it to match up pretty well with Lao, or Tai Noi script. A descendent of Brahmi script (which was known to be used in SouthEast Asia), vowels can be written above or below the consonants as predicted. I wonder if we might be seeing both old and new versions of the Lao script.
After many long looks and comparisons, I have arrived at the same conclusion which I was more or less leaning towards last week in terms of identifying our script. Our manuscript seems to be written in the Lao script or one of its very related predecessors such as Tai Noi. I decided to begin by examining the days of the week in Lao, since we more or less decided last class that the letters which repeated in groups of seven were denoting days of the week. On YouTube I immediately found a video teaching the days of the week in Lao:
The English transliteration alongside the Lao script was especially useful. Clearly wan repeats for each day, and thus presumably means “day,” so this first letter could not be the unique letter used to identify each individual day. Looking just past the wan (ວັນ), we can create a list of the first letters of each day which are unique. We can then compare this list to the repeating letters on the chart, or the letters which Dr. Walker wrote on the board that we took directly out of our manuscript. However, our list on the board appears to have started on Thursday, so lets reorder the YouTube list to match:
“Thursday” is the only day which does not match up nicely. However, if we consider the Lao transliteration provided by YouTube, we can see that “Thursday” is “pa-hat.” In other words, it starts with “p.” According to Wikipedia, the Lao letter provided here is something more like an aspirated /pʰ/. However, if we look at the unaspirated /p/, then the letter is ປ which looks remarkably similar to Dr. Walker’s writing and our manuscript. The letters for “Friday,” “Saturday,” “Monday,” “Tuesday,” and “Wednesday” all look the same as well, if one just removes some of the vowel diacritics. I assume that the vowel diacritics remain on the letters ສຸ and ສ because the consonant is the same as the vowel is the only thing which distinguishes them. I am not sure why the vowel diacritic remains on ພຸ if in our manuscript we don’t have another instance of ພ (the manuscript instead uses ປ).
“Sunday” is another interesting case. At first I couldn’t figure it out because I was considering only the ອ which did not line up with what I am assuming is ທິ in the manuscript. However, if we look at the transliteration of “aa-thit,” then perhaps we can try ignoring the “aa” or the first few letters and see if “th” matches. Sure enough, ທິ represents /tʰ/ in Lao according to Wikipedia. Upon further investigation, I’ve found that ອ is a glottal stop /ʔ/. In informal transliterations, glottal stops may be left out since there is no equivalent grapheme in the Latin alphabet. This is perhaps why we see it transliterated as simply “aa” in this video. In any case, the modern Lao language as well as the Lao alphabet seem to map pretty well onto the script used on the chart page. I will argue that this is the same script used throughout the manuscript.
I also compared the writing to this manuscript on Wikipedia in Tai Noi. According to Wikipedia, “Tai Noi survives with a few modifications as the Lao script.”
Similarly to our manuscript, I note the overall rounded quality of the letters, as well as diacritics which seem similar. There are instances of circles above the letters in both cases which we can identify as a vowel diacritic:
In terms of the chart, I am still struggling to make sense of its exact purpose, although I think we made quite a bit of headway last class. I like the idea that it is comparing calendrical systems - this might help explain the instances of repeat numbers or lines which don’t quite match up. The linguistic confirmation that the letters represent days of the week also suggests some sort of chart which is keeping track of time. =
At first glance, the script in the manuscript appears to have many repeated symbols and characters, which is indicative that the language has an alphabet, such as English, as compared to a non-alphabetic language like Chinese. We also know that the manuscript is from mainland Southeast Asia, which narrows our set of languages, though there are still quite a few possible languages in this set. One approach is to compare the symbols in the manuscript to those in the alphabets of common Southeast Asian languages, and note any similarities. After doing this comparison for the languages we discussed in class, I found that the Lao alphabet has striking similarities with the unknown script.
In particular, I was able to map each of the characters in the large four-character phrase on the “title” page with pictures to a character in the Lao alphabet. I was able to do the same with some characters in the rest of the manuscript, though it’s worth noting that there were some characters that I couldn’t convincingly match to a Lao counterpart. It’s difficult to tell if this is because the characters are different, or just written in a different, older font. It’s promising since Lao characters are aesthetically very rounded and contain many small circles at the ends of characters, which is a distinct feature of the unknown script as well. This also begs the question: is the script an older form of a language—perhaps of Lao—that is distinct enough from its modern version that it could come off as a different language altogether? This is analogous to the traditional versus simplified versions of Chinese.
I also used a more hacky approach: I opened up my Google Translate app and used my camera to attempt auto-translate by picture. It didn’t work very well, since Translate was unable to recognize the language for the most part, but in the few instances where I got it to work, the engine suggested the script is Telugu, which is a language spoken in parts of southern India. This is also quite convincing since Telugu is also a rounded language with hoops at the ends of characters. Furthermore, I tried to directly mimic some characters in Translate’s “draw” feature in hopes of translating them to English, but the engine wasn’t able to produce anything.
For the most part, the two-page chart in the manuscript contains characters from the same unknown script in the rest of the manuscript, though the chart characters have a lot more dotted and annotated characters. From class, we noticed the recurring pattern that characters often repeat every seven rows. Also, two columns seem to serve as “date” columns, and use Arabic numerals in what appears to be a rather standard day-month or month-day format. The “day” portion of the date is incremented by one on each new row until about fifteen such days, at which point the day component resets to one (and if there have been two such cycles of fifteen for the current “month”, the month is also incremented).
These calendar-like traits of the manuscript chart point overwhelmingly to a time-based daily log of some sort, where each cell in the grid represents a specific day’s log. It’s interesting that the “log” for a given day seems to just be a single character, which would be the equivalent of writing just a single English letter like “A” or “K” each day in a journal, given that we believe the unknown script is an alphabetic language. This suggests that the chart might have been used as just a simple daily reminder to accomplish some task—such as the weekly pill boxes with a compartment for each day of the week—as opposed to some more complex meaning.