Greetings Pali-people!

Recently some friends of mine returned from Cambodia
and brought me what they think is some Pali,
written on palm leaves, as a gift. If I am not
mistaken, the text is written in Khmer. I wonder
if anyone here can verify this and/or is able to
grasp the meaning of the text?

I have some Khmer samples to which I have compared
the text (in fact, I have an entire modern
Khmer/English dictionary), however modern typeset
Khmer appears to differ from this text. One
significant difference in the palm leaves is the
frequent presence of double-strokes at the top of
characters, radiating to the upper-left. I cannot
guess which typeset vowel these strokes may
represent, as I have very little experience with
Khmer. When I first saw the double-strokes, they
reminded me of Devanaagarii, as I have never seen
such strokes in the (small amount of) Thai or Lao
text that I have studied.

I have scanned and uploaded the various leaves
in their current order (which I suppose is jumbled),
to:

http://pratyeka.org/khmer-pali/

The leaves were scanned in sets of four, fronts
then backs. There are only eight leaves (two
sets). Each of the four images are the best
part of a megabyte, so modem-users may have a
wait. All is not lost though - most browsers
will allow progressive display of JPEGs as they
download, so you can hopefully read while you wait.

The leaves appear to have been cut, such that some
of the text is probably missing. I believe that
they may in fact be cuttings from a practice or
damaged text, rather than forming a complete,
finished text in themselves.

I suppose that the contents could be quite
interesting if the leaves were old, though the
presence of what appears to be a pencil correction
on the front of leaf 5 suggests to me that they
are of recent origin...

Many thanks to anyone who can shed some light on
this mystery.

Walter Stanish
Sydney, Australia