One Thousand and One Conjectures

King Ibrahim Njoya of Bamum invented a script around 1896 and drove it through successive reforms — from the pictographic Lewa to the mature a-ka-u-ku syllabary — equipping a palace chancery, schools, court records, a religious book of his own devising, and…

Four Maya books survive — the Dresden, Madrid, and Paris codices and the Maya Codex of Mexico — against Diego de Landa's own report of the 1562 auto-da-fe at Mani: a great number of books found, and all of them burned as…

The burner made the key. Landa's Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan — itself surviving only as an abridged copy in the Real Academia de la Historia, recovered by Brasseur de Bourbourg in 1862 — records the so-called Landa alphabet: some twenty-seven…

The khipu corpus we hold is not the corpus that existed; it is the corpus that deserts preserve. The chroniclers put the great cord archives at the center — Cieza de Leon interviewed Cuzco's quipucamayocs about the histories and censuses in their…

The Mexica state was a paper state — tribute rolls, ritual books, annals — and its own historiography records the first burning: under Itzcoatl, says the tradition set down by Sahagun's Nahua informants, the lords destroyed the old books so that the…

The Mixtec historical codices — Zouche-Nuttall, Vindobonensis Mexicanus 1, Bodley, Selden, Colombino-Becker — are genealogical registers of named persons from named polities, and they cross-attest one another: the biography of Lord 8 Deer Jaguar Claw runs through several of them independently. Burgoa…

The pre-conquest Nahua song art survives through two nets dipped in the same river: the Cantares Mexicanos (Biblioteca Nacional de Mexico), with some ninety songs, and the Romances de los senores de la Nueva Espana (Benson Collection, Austin), with some sixty —…

Every major text authored by an indigenous Andean in the colonial period survives in exactly one manuscript: Guaman Poma's 1,189-page Nueva coronica y buen gobierno (GKS 2232 4to, Royal Danish Library, unknown until Pietschmann announced it in 1908), the Huarochiri manuscript —…

The Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadim (the Baghdad warraq, d. c. 385/995) catalogued the whole bookworld in ten maqalat, but its afterlife should be lopsided: for law, hadith, grammar and adab, later scholarship had dense in-genre biobibliographies of its own (tabaqat and rijal…

Ibn al-Nadim was a bookseller cataloguing stock, not a biographer: in the Fihrist the life is a header and the book-list is the point, and each entry pivots to its list with a fixed formula - (wa-)lahu min al-kutub, 'among his books…

Al-Mas'udi's Muruj al-dhahab (completed 332/943, revised 345/956) presents itself as the portable tier of a cascade: behind it stand his vast Akhbar al-zaman and the middle abridgment al-Kitab al-awsat, both now lost. If the Muruj was built as a digest that deliberately…

Yaqut's Mu'jam al-buldan (d. 626/1229) is an alphabetical gazetteer of roughly a million words, and alphabetical reference works are quarried locally - a user comes for a place, a regional historian mines a region's entries. But Safi al-Din al-Baghdadi's Marasid al-ittila' (d.…

Al-Qalqashandi's Subh al-a'sha (completed 814/1412) is a working chancery's whole shelf made one object, and for the protocol core - titulature, ranks of address, the forms of official correspondence - his declared base was the previous century's working manual, Ibn Fadl Allah…

In OpenITI as in the Bulaq print, Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddima travels at the head of 0808IbnKhaldun.Tarikh, the Kitab al-'Ibar (d. 808/1406). The 'Ibar's dynastic chronicle largely re-compiles what Ibn al-Athir and the standard histories already offered, so later historians went to the…

Ibn Battuta's Rihla (d. 770/779 AH) was dictated decades after the journeys to the litterateur Ibn Juzayy, who furnished the pilgrim's memory from the genre's classic: philologists have long shown that the set-piece descriptions of Mecca, Medina and Damascus are lifted near-verbatim…

Al-Baydawi's Anwar al-tanzil (d. c. 685/1286) is the madrasa's Kashshaf: al-Zamakhshari's philology kept, his Mu'tazilism cut - a condensation-with-censorship that made a suspect masterpiece teachable. Any two tafsirs share text through the Qur'an itself, so the descent must be read against a…

Ibn Sina (d. 428/1037) manufactured his two great compendia in opposite ways: al-Najat was assembled, by his own account and his circle's practice, largely out of his existing books - an author auto-compiling a field manual - while al-Isharat wa-l-tanbihat, the late…

Ibn Sa'd (d. 230/845) was katib al-Waqidi, and his Tabaqat al-kubra opens with a sira-maghazi wing - the first two of its eight print volumes - narrating exactly his master's subject, wholesale from his master's book; the tabaqat proper that follow (death…

Miskawayh's Tajarib al-umam (d. 421/1030) selects usable political experience and deletes the hadith apparatus: where Tabari prefixes nearly every khabar with an audition chain, Miskawayh - quarrying Tabari himself for the early centuries - strips the isnads and keeps the stories. The…

Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani's Kitab al-aghani (d. 356/967 or a few years later) flags its written sources openly with the formula nasakhtu min kitab - 'I copied from the book of -' - a scandalous candor in a citation culture where bookish transmission…

Muslim's Sahih (d. 261/875) gathers every parallel chain of a matn in one place and splices the isnads with the siglum ح (the tahwil mark); Bukhari's fiqh-driven architecture (d. 256/870) scatters a matn across chapters and needs few splices. Two rival information…

Al-Suyuti (d. 911/1505) ran a modular workshop: big compilations spun off as small titled tracts, the same material rebundled and retitled - his rival al-Sakhawi called it recycling, Suyuti called it method. Either way it should saturate a self-reuse instrument, and the…

The Pali commentaries that anchor Theravāda orthodoxy are the tombstone of a whole Sinhala literature. When Buddhaghosa worked at the Mahāvihāra of Anurādhapura in the early fifth century, he did not compose commentaries so much as translate and condense ones that already…

Buddhist epistemology begins with Dignāga's Pramāṇasamuccaya (c. 500 CE), the compendium that founded the discipline — and no Sanskrit manuscript of it is known to exist. The killer was not the fall of Indian Buddhism but the school's own success: within two…

In 659 the ten Sanskrit commentaries then current on Vasubandhu's Triṃśikā — by Dharmapāla, Sthiramati, Nanda, Citrabhānu, Guṇamati, Jinamitra, Jñānacandra, Bandhuśrī, Śuddhacandra, and Jinaputra, as Xuanzang's pupil Kuiji lists them — crossed the imperial translation bureau's desk, and a purée came out…

Kumārila Bhaṭṭa, the seventh-century champion of Mīmāṃsā against the Buddhists, left two great verse recastings of the system's foundations: the Ślokavārttika, which his school adopted as its classroom text and wrapped in a commentarial ladder (Umbeka, Sucaritamiśra, Pārthasārathimiśra), and the vaster Bṛhaṭṭīkā…

Rājaśekhara's Kāvyamīmāṃsā (c. 900), the poeticians' treatise on the whole institution of literature, opens by announcing its own architecture: eighteen adhikaraṇas, named one by one, covering the entire science. What survives is the first — the Kavirahasya, the "poet's secret," on the…

The Nāṭyaśāstra closes by naming its own successor: the remainder of the science of performance, Bharata says, Kohala will treat in a sequel — Kohala being already listed among Bharata's sons in the treatise's opening frame. For the next thousand years Kohala…

The Kāmasūtra opens with a bibliography of its own extinction event: an original attributed to Nandin in a thousand chapters, condensed by Śvetaketu Auddālaki to five hundred, recut by Bābhravya Pāñcāla to one hundred and fifty in seven sections, then parcelled out…

The Carakasaṃhitā's frame narrative counts what Indian medicine's first generation wrote: Ātreya Punarvasu taught six pupils — Agniveśa, Bhela, Jatūkarṇa, Parāśara, Hārīta, Kṣārapāṇi — and each composed his own saṃhitā. Six parallel foundations. The ledger fifteen centuries on: Agniveśa's text lives, but…

The Carakasaṃhitā confesses to being one-third replacement part. Its final redactor, Dṛḍhabala of Pañcanadapura, states in the text itself that he found the saṃhitā mutilated and reconstituted it, supplying seventeen chapters of the Cikitsāsthāna and the entire Kalpasthāna and Siddhisthāna — forty-one…

Āryabhaṭa (born 476) wrote two astronomies: the Āryabhaṭīya, which survives, reckoning the day from sunrise, and a second system reckoning from midnight — the ārdharātrika system, the so-called Āryabhaṭasiddhānta — which is lost. Its afterlife is purely parametric: Brahmagupta built his working…

The Sattasaī ascribed to King Hāla — the foundational anthology of Prakrit lyric — carries its own production statistic: an opening gāthā says the seven hundred were selected from a crore, ten million, of ornate verses. Discount the hyperbole and the claim…

Apabhraṃśa was a full literary language — third of the classical triad the poeticians list beside Sanskrit and Prakrit — and its own tradition names its classics: Svayambhūdeva's ninth-century metrical treatise, the Svayambhūcchandas, teaches the metres by quoting the masters, above all…

The oldest stratum of the eastern Indo-Aryan vernaculars — the caryā songs of the tantric siddhas, claimed as the fountainhead by Bengali, Assamese, Odia, and Maithili literary history alike — survives in exactly one manuscript: the palm-leaf codex of the fifty-song collection…

The Gāndhārī birch-bark scrolls — the British Library collection acquired in 1994, then the Senior, Bajaur, Split, and kindred collections — are the oldest manuscripts of South Asia, written around the turn of the common era and the two centuries following, and…

The oldest surviving book in Kannada is a book about how to write Kannada books. The Kavirājamārga ("The Way of the King of Poets," c. 870, from the Rāṣṭrakūṭa court of Amoghavarṣa Nṛpatuṅga) is a treatise on poetics and usage, and a…

Telugu literature begins with Nannaya's Mahābhārata (mid-eleventh century) — begins, that is, in the manuscript record. In stone, written Telugu is over four centuries older: the language appears in inscriptions from the sixth century (the Renāṭi Cōḷa records, the Kalamalla inscription of…

Classical Tamil is India's second classical literature, and it nearly failed to arrive. When U. V. Swaminatha Iyer and C. W. Damodaram Pillai went hunting in the 1880s, the Caṅkam corpus — the Eṭṭuttokai anthologies and the Pattuppāṭṭu — survived in a…

The Paripāṭal, one of the eight Caṅkam anthologies, comes with a table of contents in verse: an old Tamil catalogue-stanza transmitted with the text counts seventy poems and departments them by subject — eight to Tirumāl, thirty-one to Cevvēḷ (Murukaṉ), one to…

Diego de Landa's Relación de las cosas de Yucatán records the sentence passed at the Maní auto-da-fé of July 1562: a large number of books in the Maya characters were found, and because they contained nothing free of superstition and the devil's…

Motolinía's prologue letter enumerates, from direct observation in the 1530s and 1540s, the five kinds of books the Nahuas kept: of the years and times; of the days and feasts; of dreams and auguries; of baptism and the names given to children;…

Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, mestizo heir of the Texcocan royal house, built his histories — the Historia de la nación chichimeca above all — on what he called the original paintings of his ancestors, and he transmitted the tradition that Texcoco, the…

Around the turn of the eighteenth century, central Mexican towns began producing 'ancient' books to order: the Techialoyan codices, a corpus of dozens of manuscripts on native amate paper, painted and written in a deliberately archaizing manner, narrating each town's founding, its…

The Aztec empire ran on fiscal paper: a calpixqui steward in every tributary province, schedules by the eighty-day period, and painted registers of the class the Codex Mendoza's second part re-creates for the viceroy — a class whose sole surviving pre-conquest-style exemplar…

The five members of the Borgia Group — the Codex Borgia and Vaticanus B in the Vatican, the Cospi in Bologna, the Fejérváry-Mayer in Liverpool, the Laud in Oxford — stand among the dozen-odd books surviving from the entire pre-contact hemisphere, and…

Classic Maya courts made books seven centuries before the oldest surviving Maya codex was painted, and the proof is double: excavated and depicted. Excavated: elite tombs at Uaxactún, Altun Ha, and Copán, among other sites, have yielded the remains of screenfold codices…

The Books of Chilam Balam survive from eight or nine Yucatec towns — Chumayel, Tizimín, Kaua, Ixil, Tekax, Nah, Tusik, and Maní's material through the Códice Pérez — and they are not nine independent works but nine local instances of one distributed…

The Popol Vuh survives because a Dominican curate at Chichicastenango, Francisco Ximénez, borrowed and copied a K'iche' manuscript around 1701-03; the original was never seen again, and Ximénez's copy traveled a chain nobody designed — convent shelf, the Universidad de San Carlos…

The Inca state kept a pictorial dynastic archive alongside the khipu: Cristóbal de Molina of Cuzco describes a house of the Sun called Poquen Cancha, near the city, holding the painted lives of each ruler, and Sarmiento de Gamboa describes Pachacuti's historical…