A fantastic new paper by Abimardha Kurniawan that finally deciphers the mysterious Javanese dating system called 'sakala dihyang'. This practice, which disguises year numerals in multiple layers of encoding, was particularly common in the mountains of Java
ejournal.perpusnas.go.id/jm/article/dow… The Javanese loved chronograms, which are systems for encoding numbers (especially years) in symbolic forms. The sakala dihyang represents perhaps the most complex of these systems, not properly understood until now newmandala.org/the-art-of-dat…

Another fascinating growth area in recent years is the early history of northern Sumatra. New philological and archaeological work has improved and often challenged our understanding of 13th–15th century polities like Lamri and Pasai, and the communities around them Guillot & Kalus' 2008 edition and translation of a large corpus of Pasai funerary inscriptions opened up new interpretations of the Pasai Sultanate's history, including evidence of a Turkic-descended royal dynasty in the late 14th century worldcat.org/title/monument…

Ludovico di Varthema, an Italian visitor, chartered a ship from Borneo to Java in 1505. The captain, who was almost certainly Indonesian, used a "compass with a magnet" and "a chart all marked with lines, perpendicular and across". The whole passage is worth reading: The English translation is by John Winter Jones (1863, pp. 248-251), and this Italian edition was published in Venice in 1535 (ff. 70r-v), digitised by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek: reader.digitale-sammlungen.de/en/fs1/object/…

People of the Indo-Malay archipelago made maps of land and sea at least as far back as the 13th c. Unlike medieval European maps, none of these early indigenous maps survived, but we know they existed because foreigners wrote about them and probably copied them The Yuan official history mentions that in 1293, the defeated Yuan army brought back from Java "a map and census register" (地圖戶籍) of the country. I'm not sure if it says that these were given by the Javanese king himself, but historians infer so chinesenotes.com/yuanshi/yuansh…

Another parallel between Old English and Javanese poetry is the toponym list genre. The English poem Widsith (7-10th c) describes a journey in mid-1st millennium Europe with lists of places and peoples. The Javanese Desavarnana and Sundanese Bujangga Manik (14-15th) do the same Widsith focusses on the names of tribes and their leaders, repeating the formula "mid X ic wæs ond mid Y". One can read this as a sort of ethnic map of Europe, sketched out by the poet's travels phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de/fileadmin/Reda…

I love the Old English poem "The Ruin", which describes buildings wrecked by time and imagines the people who built them. The diction makes for a really vivid scene: wrætlic ("wondrous"), undereotone ("eaten under"), eorðgrap ("earth's grip") en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ruin This great blog post helped me, who knows no Old English, to understand just how artful the poem's construction is deorreader.wordpress.com/2019/03/31/wra…

In terms of surviving documents, Old Malay goes back as far as Old English (7th century), and Old Javanese as far as Old French (9th century). All four vernaculars emerged out of cosmopolitan literate cultures: Sanskrit in Indonesia and Latin in Europe The 7th century ones are religious. The Old Malay Sojomerto inscription pays homage ("samwah hiyaŋ" > Modern Indonesian "sembahyang") to Śiva and all the deities, while Cædmon's hymn in Old English praises the Christian God as the "hefaenricaes uard" (guard of heaven's realm)

Time for some Old Javanese poetry! This is from the 15th-century Śivaratrikalpa, where a hunter views a coastal scene (3.13). The text was edited and translated collaboratively by Teeuw, Robson, Worsley, Galestin and Zoetmulder. I've tweaked their translation only slightly The poet Tanakung mentions the king Suraprabhāva (1466–78). The poem is an adaptation of a Sanskrit didactic story about a particular religious observance in honour of Śiva. But because it is in kakawin poetic form, Tanakung adds his own nature scenes, like this one

The Pararaton is an authentic Javanese historical text compiled in the 15th or 16th century. It is not a forgery by Dutch scholars. I'll talk about how we know this, drawing on my recent article tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108… Let me know if you have difficulty accessing the article, I can help

The Old Javanese word for the official demarcation of a tax-privilege zone by the government ("susuk") seems to share the same root as the modern obscenity "jancuk", going back to the PMP pair *suk/*cuk "pierce". I guess tax officials were already screwing people back in 800 CE My reasoning is that "jancuk" was a casual pronunciation of "diancuk", and the verb "ancuk" comes from *aN + *cuk. In Old Javanese we have another form "anucuk" (< *aN + *cukcuk) "to peck, poke, prick", which shows that both the *suk and *cuk forms were known in Java

"Pangeran Anum seeks the assistance of the King of England in vanquishing the Dutch in Jayakatera, and if the Dutch in Jayakatera are defeated the English may take their place"

A lovely set of 17th-century diplomatic letters published by @BLMalay!

tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108… "Pangeran Anum’s gift to the King of England is two cassowary birds, a keris studded (with jewels) and a lance". Sadly Charles I was too busy with his personal rule to fight the Dutch on Java. But imagine if the English had gained control of Jakarta in 1635!

Many Javanese words have a schwa in their first syllable: təlu (three), pəkan (market), dəmak (gift). In Old Jav texts these usually written as <təlu> or <tlu>, with the unwritten first vowel pronounced as normal. But in the oldest inscriptions I'm finding a weird third option... Instead of schwa, the vowel is written <a> and the next consonant is doubled: <tallu>, <pakkan>, <dammak>. This leads to some forms that, in my very subjective opinion, look quite un-Javanese: <inammassan> for inəmasan (gilded)

For a hundred years, people have used the term "Middle Javanese", and for that whole time, we have said "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it". It's time we got serious about working out if it is a historical form, a regional variety, or a genre register of Javanese It's hard because fewer Middle Javanese texts survive and they are harder to date than Old or Modern Javanese texts. But we have more text editions available now than even a few decades ago, so I think the time is ripe to come back to this issue

A remarkably succinct and accurate summary of a long-running scholarly debate: how useful are Javanese chronicles for writing history, and to what extent should we consider them historical texts?

https://twitter.com/jawasastra/status/1291745038108487680

When Europeans started to study Javanese history (Raffles' time or even earlier), they pondered how reliable Javanese historical texts were. Progress has been incredibly slow. We're still asking the same questions: "are they a mix of history and myth?", "which bits can we trust?"

When Brandes first published the Deśavarṇana in 1902, he called it the Nagarakṛtāgama, because that title appears the Balinese colophon of the manuscript he used. As early as 1913, Poerbatjaraka showed that Prapañca actually called his poem the Deśavarṇana (94.2) For some reason, scholars continued to use the title Nagarakṛtāgama, even though Poerbatjaraka's argument was clearly right. The more this happened, the more entrenched the title became, and the harder it was to break the habit

It looks like we are just as divided as the scholars! The reason for the disagreement is that Prapañca only mentions his relationship to the Superintendent once, in a very ambiguously worded stanza of the Deśavarṇana (17.8):

https://twitter.com/infiniteteeth/status/1290653316054241280

I've tried to translate as literally as possible, to show the grammatical ambiguity. The subject of line (a) is Prapañca, the subject of (b) is "the poet", the subject of (c) is "the Superintendent", and the subject of (d) is "the monks".

The Balinese manuscript tradition is one of the best documented and most publicly accessible from Indonesia. You can find a wealth of manuscripts from Bali, including a vast range of genres, in a few key public institutions that I list here The National Library of Indonesia's collection goes back furthest, to Balinese manuscripts collected in the 1830s and 1840s by the Batavian Society. After the conquest of northern Bali by the Netherlands Indies, many manuscripts from this part of the island flooded into Batavia

When evidence is sparse, historians draw inferences to make a coherent story: "Given X and Y, it is likely that Z". After a while, qualifiers drop out: "X, Y and Z". Inferences harden into facts. What is actually a bridge between pieces of evidence is treated as evidence itself This happens often in premodern SE Asian history, because we have so little evidence. For example, the Pararaton says a king of Java "became a sage" in 1400 and his daughter took the throne. Then it says there was a civil war in 1404-06 involving the old king and his relatives

An interesting thread on the massacre of Sundanese in 1357. Lots of scepticism among Indonesians about whether this event really happened, and suspicion that the Dutch used this ethnically-divisive narrative as a tool of colonial rule

https://twitter.com/chaoticbrain/status/1284066871881302016

Sceptics point to the fact that no 14th-century sources mention the massacre. That's absolutely true. But there are many events that we know only from later sources like the Pararaton (16th c), for instance, Gajah Mada's oath to conquer the archipelago

I love the Pararaton. It's a disordered and chaotic text. It's often obscure and sometimes barely intelligible. Like in a kaleidoscope, every fragment gives us a new and different look at medieval Java. It's so much richer and more mysterious than its dreary title: "The Monarchs" Many people are most familiar with the Ken Angrok part of the Pararaton. But to my mind, Angrok is a repulsive character and his story is one of the most boring parts of the text. He seizes power by theft, violence, and nasty politicking – who cares?

An amazing piece of news to me! The place name Śrīvijaya, which scholars have thought was lost in the local traditions, turns up in the Old Sundanese Carita Parahyangan – but as the name of a person: "Sang Sriwijaya"

https://twitter.com/AsiaLangsOnline/status/1276840197485924353

The text mentions Sang Sriwijaya twice, but is inconsistent about where he's from. On f. 16a it says he is from Keling, but on 45b it says he is in Malayu. It's not unusual for place names to be turned into personal names and vice versa in the early modern Javanese texts