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The ''Bower Manuscript'' is an early birch bark document, dated to the Gupta era (between the 4th and the 6th century). It is written in Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit using the Late Brahmi script. The manuscript is notable for preserving one of the earliest treatises on Indian medicine (Ayurveda). Rudolf Hoernle (1910) suggested that the text of the manuscript contains excerpts of the (otherwise unknown) ''Bheda Samhita'' on medicine.〔A. F. Rudolf Hoernle, ''The Bheda Samhita in the Bower Manuscript'', The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (1910), 830-833.〕 The medical parts (I-III) constitute may be based on similar types of medical writings antedating the composition of the saṃhitās of Caraka, Suśruta, and as such rank with the earliest surviving texts on Ayurveda. It is today preserved as part of the collections of the Bodleian Library in Oxford. The Bower Manuscript in reality is a collection of seven distinct manuscripts, or it may be called a collective manuscript of seven parts. ==Discovery and edition== The Bower Manuscript is named after Hamilton Bower, the British Army intelligence officer who obtained it from a local inhabitant in Kucha early in 1890, while on a confidential mission for the government of British India. Bower took the MS to Simla on his return, whence it was forwarded to Colonel James Waterhouse, the then the President of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Waterhouse exhibited the manuscript at the monthly meeting of the Society on 5 November 5, 1890. After the meeting some attempts were made to decipher the MS, but they proved unsuccessful. German Indologist Georg Buhler succeeded in reading and translating two leaves of the MS, reproduced in the form of heliogravures in the Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Immediately after his return to India in February 1891, A. F. R. Hoernle began to study the MS. He presented the first decipherment two months later, at the meeting of the Society in April 1891. Between 1893 and 1897 Hoernle published a complete edition of the text, featuring an annotated English translation and illustrated facsimile plates. A Sanskrit Index was published in 1908, and a revised translation of the medical portions (I,II,and III) in 1909; the Introduction appeared in 1912. The discovery of the Bower Manuscript caught the attentions of the outward-looking European powers, arousing further interest in the region of its discovery and proving a major stimulus in the development of the Great Game. Hoernle claimed that "it was the discovery of the Bower manuscript and its publication in Calcutta which started the whole modern movement of archaeological exploration of Eastern Turkestan". 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Bower Manuscript」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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