The Bakhshali Manuscript is an Ancient Indian mathematical manuscript written on birch bark which was found near the village of Bakhshali in 1881 in what was then the North-West Frontier Province of British India (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, in Pakistan). It's written in Śāradā script and in Gatha dialect (which is a combination of the ancient Indian languages of Sanskrit and Prakrit). The manuscript is incomplete, with only seventy leaves of birch bark, many of which are mere scraps. Many remain undiscovered. The Bakhshali manuscript, which is currently too fragile to be examined by scholars, is currently housed in the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford (MS. Sansk. d. 14).
Its date is uncertain, and has generated considerable debate. Most scholars agree that the physical manuscript is a copy of a more ancient text, so that the dating of that ancient text is possible only based on the content. Recent scholarship dates it between the 2nd c. BC and the 3d c. AD; Ian Pearce summarizes the positions:
However, earlier scholars have tended to date it around 400 AD (Hoernle, Datta/Singh, Bag, Gupta). Hayashi had suggested a possible seventh century date[2], while in an early colonial estimate, G.R. Kaye had assessed it to be as late as 12th c. AD. Such late dates are quite unlikely because the language used was already dying by the 4th c.; also the work does not mention integer equations and other topics which were of widespread interest after Aryabhata (5th c. AD). Today, Kaye's assessment is widely discredited.[3][4].
The reason why the date of the manuscript is important, is that if the work indeed dates from the 3d c. or earlier, it would imply that the concept of the mathematical zero was known several centuries earlier than the work of Brahmagupta in the 7th c.
The manuscript gives various algorithms and techniques for a variety of problems, such as computing square roots and dealing with negative numbers.[5]