The physical medium that carried Sanskrit literature across two thousand years before paper and printing — dried palm leaves, inscribed with a stylus and rubbed with ink, bundled and stored for centuries at a time.
शताब्दियों तक प्रयुक्त · used across centuries
Scribes inscribed text onto prepared palm leaves with a sharp metal stylus, then rubbed the surface with a mixture of soot or turmeric to fill the incised lines and make the writing legible, before stringing the finished leaves together through a central hole into a bound bundle, or pothi.
The tropical climate that helped preserve Sanskrit's oral tradition proved hostile to palm-leaf manuscripts themselves, most surviving copies dating back only a few centuries even for texts far older, meaning much of what we read today depends on generations of scribes recopying deteriorating leaves by hand, long before print, to keep each text alive.