What are the difficulties historians faced …

The historians face several difficulties in using manuscripts. There was no printing press in those days so scribes copied manuscripts by hand. Manuscript copying is not an easy job. As scribes copied manuscripts, they also introduced small changes—a word here, a sentence there. These small differences grew over centuries of copying until manuscripts of the same text became substantially different from one another. This is a serious problem because we rarely find the original manuscript of the author today. We are totally dependent upon the copies made by later scribes. As a result historians have to read different manuscript versions of the same text to guess what the author had originally written.

Manuscripts in early days were handwritten. Writers used palm leaves as paper for writing manuscripts. The historians used to copy down those manuscripts. Different historians presented their version in their own way as many of the words or sentences were beyond their understanding. So they copied what they understood. Later it was difficult to recognize which one was the original manuscript. Historians interpreted the facts as per the manuscripts which they got. Hence we find a number of facts with different illustrations in history.