Carbon Dating the Silence: Dating the Absence of Text in the Gita's Manuscript Tradition

New radiocarbon assays of palm-leaf fragments from Kerala have challenged the presumed 4th-century CE origin of the Bhagavad Gita’s earliest coherent recensions. By correlating dendrochronological data with scribal colophons, this analysis pushes back the stabilization of the text by nearly two centuries, impacting our understanding of its transmission through oral and written hybridity.

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