English: The UVSL 589 is a multi-text, 100 folio palm manuscript book preserved at the U. V. Swaminatha Aiyar Library in Chennai.
The book consists of palm leaf pages with texts written on it on both sides, with holes with which it is traditionally tied with a rope like millions of historic palm leaf manuscripts found in South Asia (India, Nepal in particular).
The pages of the book have three primary languages (Tamil, Sanskrit and little bit Telugu) and three scripts (Tamil, Grantha and Telugu). Since it was discovered in the 19th-century, the discovering scholars likely added the arabic numerals on the left (page 20 and 21). This suggests that a Telugu and Tamil community likely worked together to create and preserve this text.
This manuscript has sections of multiple Tamil texts, including the Tirumurukarruppatai - a Sangam era text (pre-3rd century CE).
Since the hot humid plant-eating insects environment of South India causes palm leaf manuscript manuscripts to degrade over time (decades or a century), these manuscripts were copied over time. The text has copious signs and dedications on numerous pages to the Shaiva tradition of Hinduism, and was preserved by Shaiva Hindu monastery.
For a scholarly analysis of this manuscript: Jonas Buchholz and Giovanni Ciotti (2017), What a Multiple-text Manuscript Can Tell Us about the Tamil Scholarly Tradition: The Case of UVSL 589, ISSN 1867–9617, Universitat Hamburg, Germany
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