The struck passage

A single bundle of palm leaves in Grantha script, copied in the seventeenth century from a recitation line no other copy of which survives. The root text gives the flood of Manu substantially as the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa preserves it. Between its sentences the copyist has carried down an older gloss.

“…a fish came into his hands in the water they brought him for washing. It said: keep me, and I will keep thee. A flood will carry away all these creatures; from that I will carry thee. He kept it in a jar, then in a pit, then in the sea. In the year it had named he made a ship, and when the water rose he entered the ship and tied its rope to the horn of the fish, and it drew him to the northern mountain. The fish said: I have carried thee. Bind the ship to a tree, and go down only as the water goes down.”

“Here the old reciters added the sending out of the birds, which is not now recited: that he loosed a dove, and it found no rest and came back to him; and that he loosed a crow. Of the crow they teach two ways: loosed first, it told him nothing; loosed last, it saw the waters going back and did not come back, and by its not coming back he knew. The passage was struck, the teachers saying: each school keeps what it was given and gives up what it was not, and the birds were never ours.”

The received text orders the descent — “go down only as the water goes down” — and names no means of knowing the water is gone. The struck passage is the means. No surviving Indian telling of the flood sends out birds; in the eleventh tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh the raven goes last, in the eighth chapter of Genesis it goes first, and the gloss keeps both orders. Crews on these coasts carried shore-sighting crows for centuries after the striking.

The fragment then rejoins the received text: the descent by the slope since named the going-down of Manu; the water carrying away all these creatures, and Manu alone left here; then, desirous of offspring, the offering poured into the receding water, clarified butter, sour milk, whey, and curds; and within a year a woman produced from the offering, and through her the race now living. The leaf breaks at the string-hole in the middle of her first sentence. Transcription confidence: 91%.