Scholars at the Digital Humanities Quarterly have announced the successful decipherment of rare 8th-century palimpsests written in the enigmatic Bhaiksuki script. Using a new AI-driven morphological analysis tool, the team identified a series of lost Sanskrit medical treatises detailing the systematic classification of over 200 alpine herbs and their chemical properties for treating metabolic disorders.
The recovered text, believed to be a lost portion of a larger monastic medical encyclopedia, describes extraction and distillation processes that suggest a high level of pharmaceutical knowledge in ancient Bihar. This breakthrough provides new insights into the cross-regional exchange of medical knowledge between Nalanda and the Himalayan regions during the early medieval period.