The Bakhshālī Manuscript is the name given to the oldest extant manuscript in Indian mathematics. It is so called because it was discovered by a peasant in 1881 at a small village called Bakhshālī, about 80 km northeast of Peshawar (now in Pakistan). It is preserved in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University.
The extant portion of the manuscript consists of 70 fragmentary leaves of birchbark. The original size of a leaf is estimated to be about 17 cm wide and 13.5 cm high. The original order of the leaves can only be conjectured on the bases of rather unsound criteria, such as the logical sequence of contents; order of the leaves in which they reached A. F. R. Hoernle, who did the first research on the manuscript; physical appearance such as the size, shape, degree of damage, and knots; and partially preserved serial numbers of mathematical rules (9–11, 13–29, and 50–58).
The script is the earlier type of the Śāradā script, which was in use in the northwestern part of India, namely,...
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References
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Hayashi, T. (2014). Bakhshālī Manuscript. In: Selin, H. (eds) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3934-5_9216-2
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