Published Paper Details:

Documentation is one of the key tools in present era especially in the field of medicine. Lack of technical advancements forced the ancient seers to record and document their preaching on surfaces such as inscriptions over stone, talapatra, bhurjapatra, etc. Since the materials would deteriorate and lose the writings over a period of time, it was necessary to constantly make copies of the same. A group of people made this as a profession and called as scribe. Sometimes on account of lesser subject expertise along with other manual limitations, original manuscripts were slightly altered during the process of copying. These are called as scribal errors. Thus, the reader may not be able to connect with the ideas of the original author. Ayurveda is one such field where the available manuscripts are old and scribal errors is inevitable. Knowledge of scribal errors helps the reader to differentiate the original and distorted content in a manuscript which indirectly helps in the application of principles of Ayurveda known as siddhanta. An overview of scribal error and its relevance in present era is presented in this work.