Palm-leaf manuscript in the context of "Shiva"

A sacred language, liturgical language or holy language is a language that is cultivated and used primarily for religious reasons (like church service) by people who speak another, primary language in their daily lives.

Some religions, or parts of them, regard the language of their sacred texts as in itself sacred. These include Ecclesiastical Latin in Roman Catholicism, Hebrew in Judaism, Arabic in Islam, Avestan in Zoroastrianism, Sanskrit in Hinduism, and Punjabi in Sikhism. By contrast Buddhism and Christian denominations outside of Catholicism do not generally regard their sacred languages as sacred in themselves.

Ancient literature comprises religious and scientific documents, tales, poetry and plays, royal edicts and declarations, and other forms of writing that were recorded on a variety of media, including stone, clay tablets, papyri, palm leaves, and metal.

Before the spread of writing, oral literature did not always survive well, but some texts and fragments have persisted.

The Odia script (Odia: ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଅକ୍ଷର, romanized: Oṛiā akṣara, also Odia: ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଲିପି, romanized: Oṛiā lipi) is a Brahmic script, mainly used to write the Odia language. To a lesser extent, it is also used to write Sanskrit and other regional languages. It is one of the official scripts of the Indian Republic. The script has developed over more than 1000 years from a variant of Siddhaṃ script which was used in Eastern India, where the characteristic top line transformed into a distinct round umbrella shape due to the influence of palm leaf manuscripts and also being influenced by the neighbouring scripts from the Western and Southern regions.

Odia is a syllabic alphabet or an abugida wherein all consonants have an inherent vowel embedded within. Diacritics (which can appear above, below, before, or after the consonant they belong to) are used to change the form of the inherent vowel. When vowels appear at the beginning of a syllable, they are written as independent letters. Also, when certain consonants occur together, special conjunct symbols combine the essential parts of each consonant symbol.

Lontara or lontaraq (ᨒᨚᨈᨑ) are Bugis-Makassar palm-leaf manuscripts that record knowledge on such topics as history, science, custom, and laws. The term originates from the Javanese/Malay word lontar, which is the name of the palm tree Borassus flabellifer that provides the leaves used.

The types of lontara includes

Ola leaf is a palm leaf used for writing in traditional palm-leaf manuscripts and in fortune telling (horoscopes) in Southern India and Sri Lanka.

The Spitzer Manuscript is the oldest surviving philosophical manuscript in Sanskrit, and possibly the oldest discovered Sanskritic manuscript of any type related to Hinduism and Buddhism. The manuscript was found in 1906 in the form of a pile of more than 1,000 palm leaf fragments in the Ming-oi, Kizil Caves, China, during the third Turfan expedition headed by Albert Grünwedel. It is named after Moritz Spitzer, whose team first studied it in 1927–28.

The calibrated age by Carbon-14 technique is 130 CE (80–230 CE). According to Indologist Eli Franco, palaeographical features suggest a date closer to 200–230 CE. The text is written in the Brahmi script (Kushana period) and some early Gupta script.

Buddhist texts are religious texts that belong to, or are associated with, Buddhism and its traditions. There is no single textual collection for all of Buddhism. Instead, there are three main Buddhist Canons: the Pāli Canon of the Theravāda tradition, the Chinese Buddhist Canon used in East Asian Buddhist tradition, and the Tibetan Buddhist Canon used in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism.

The earliest Buddhist texts were not committed to writing until some centuries after the death of Gautama Buddha. The oldest surviving Buddhist manuscripts are the Gandhāran Buddhist texts, found in Pakistan and written in Gāndhārī, they date from the first century BCE to the third century CE. The first Buddhist texts were initially passed on orally by Buddhist monastics, but were later written down and composed as manuscripts in various Indo-Aryan languages (such as Pāli, Gāndhārī, and Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit). These texts were collected into various collections and translated into other languages such as Buddhist Chinese (fójiào hànyǔ 佛教漢語) and Classical Tibetan as Buddhism spread outside of India.