Indian Epigraphy c9.t2.9

c9.t2.9

The inner bark of the Aguru or Aloe tree (*Aquilaria agallocha*), called Sāci in Assam, was the most popular material for writing manuscripts in the north-eastern corner of India.² The sheets of this bark, made specially ready for writing, were called Sāci-pāt (literally, ‘the Sāci leaf’) in Assamese. A large number of manuscripts written on this material have been discovered in Assam and some of them have found their way to the libraries and museums of the Western countries.³ A manuscript of the Sundarakāṇḍa of the Rāmāyaṇa, written on aloe-bark sheets in the Bengali-Maithili-Assamese characters of about the 15th century, is preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. It is believed that some of the bark sheets of the manuscript contain a layer of wood with them.⁴