Palm leaf manuscripts are manuscripts made out of dried palm leaves. They served as the paper of the ancient world in parts of Asia as far back as the fifteenth century BC. and possibly much earlier. They were used to record actual and mythical narratives in South Asia and in South East Asia. Initially knowledge was passed down orally, but after the invention of alphabets and their diffusion to South Asia, people eventually began to write it down in dried and smoke treated palm leaves of Palmyra palm or talipot palm. Once written down, each document had a limited time before which the document had to be copied onto new sets of dried palm leaves.