ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ways that the materiality of an ultimately illegible letter participated in the diplomatic mission, complementing and sometimes contradicting both the written text of the letter as well as the oral parsing of the text offered by the envoys who carried it. It also contributes new material to the people knowledge of the technologies of containment associated both with palm-leaf documents and with Mamluk decrees. The chapter is a reminder that writing materials and writing cultures more broadly were an integral part of these exchanges and are deserving of the people attention. Before turning to the Mamluk sources and their accounts of this Sri Lankan embassy, it is useful to review briefly the very different writing cultures and materialities of writing present across the Indian Ocean area. Until systematic studies of interactions between writing cultures across the Indian Ocean area are undertaken, the people remain at the level of tantalizing, but nevertheless isolated, anecdotes and rare survivals.
