A.J. West
Introduction
People in medieval Java used a wide range of different forms of script that varied dramatically in style and appearance. All are Brahmic alphasyllabaries with near-identical grapheme inventories, and the variants are perhaps not distinct enough to be referred to as scripts in their own right – but the forms often vary to the extent that knowing one script does not allow one to easily parse text in another from a similar time and place. No manuscripts have survived from Java from before the fourteenth century AD and nearly all of these script variants are known only from inscriptions.
The styles vary from thin curving hands written left-to-right to rectangular blocks written vertically and read from bottom to top, with all manner of variants in between. The variety is extraordinary when one considers that almost all of these styles developed locally over the course of a single millennium on an island smaller than Great Britain. The more peculiar variants were developed over about 500 years in East Java, an Indonesian province about half the size of Ireland. This phenomenon has received less attention than it deserves, in part because palaeography in Indonesia has been treated principally as an aid in the reading of texts; that scripts might encode or express values seems only rarely to have been considered in academic work. The purpose of this paper is to showcase some of these extraordinary Javan writing styles and to pose the question of how this diversity came about.
First I will provide an outline of the geography and history of Java in order to put its scripts into context. I will then briefly go over how Brahmic alphasyllabaries work before outlining some of the diachronic changes in Javan writing systems and showcasing some of the more interesting variants. The bulk of the material consists of an impressionistic survey of script forms, many of the images of which have been
taken from photographs in Leiden University Library (UBL).1 The terminology used in describing the script is somewhat imprecise and it would be difficult to quantify the number of relevant variants, which makes it hard to summarise the diversity of these scripts concisely. In lieu of a precise classification I will resort to an impressionistic survey based on photographs and descriptions of specific types, which will make up the bulk of the paper. I will then speculate as to the reasons behind the variation that we see.
The model I propose is predicated on the low survival rate of palm leaves as writing material in the humid tropics. While other writing materials are likely to have been used in medieval Java, including pudak (the petal sheath of the pandan flower, mentioned in Javanese literature as a medium for writing private notes to lovers) and daluwaṅ (modern Javanese dluwang, the bark of Broussonetia papyrifera), no manuscripts written on these have survived, and the latter is not mentioned in any surviving texts. Palm leaves – specifically the dried leaves of lontar (Borassus flabellifer) and gebang/gĕbaṅ (Corypha utan) palms – appear to have been the principal writing surfaces in medieval Java. As palm-leaf manuscripts decayed rapidly, mutations in the graphemes crept in faster than they did in many other parts of the pre-modern world, and different scriptoria – many of them religious foundations – amplified and propagated the more interesting versions of these scripts for their own ends. The resulting variants were then used in official stone and copper inscriptions, with little institutional memory of earlier versions. A crucial role may have been played in the formation of some of the more elaborate decorative scripts by Javanese elites who enjoyed aesthetic variation and novelty.
Background The Island of Java
Located between the islands of Sumatra and Bali in what is now the Republic of Indonesia, Java today has around 140 million inhabitants, comprising the bulk of Indonesia’s population and making Java the most populous island in the world (Fig. 10.1). It is only slightly larger than England, at around 139,000 km2, and is thus extremely densely populated. This density is a recent phenomenon: although foreign commentators in the Middle Ages, like Marco Polo, believed Java to be superlatively populous, population density across the island before the sixteenth century was lower than in Europe at the same time (Reid 1988, 15; Andaya and Andaya 2015, 37–39). Java is also the world’s most volcanically active island (Whitten et al. 1996, 93). The island is subject to year-round heat and humidity. Rainfall is greatest in the mountainous west, where the wet season can persist for as long as eleven months, and lowest in the east, where the dry season can last nine months. In the past this influenced Java’s
1 The photographs in this paper have been taken from the Leiden Digital Collections website (https://digitalcollections.universiteitleiden.nl/) and are referred to here by ‘UBL’ (Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden) followed by the shelfmark.
demography; in East Java, where the soil is less leached by rain, the land was more densely settled than in West Java (Cribb 2000, 19).
Java is home to three languages in the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family: Javanese, with over 90 million speakers concentrated in Central and East Java; Sundanese, with around 40 million speakers in the provinces of West Java and Banten (and the west of Central Java); and Malay/Indonesian, the lingua franca of the island and indeed the entire country (Cribb 2000, 31–38). The ancestral forms of these languages are all attested in medieval inscriptions from Java, as is Sanskrit, the cosmopolitan language of the island’s medieval elites.2 Because Java is inhabited by speakers of both Sundanese and Javanese, in addition to dialects of Malay, I will use the adjective ‘Javanese’ when discussing Javanese speakers and their societies and the useful (but seldom used) adjective ‘Javan’ for the island or its societies in general.
The historiography of Java
The early history of Java is not well-evidenced, in large part due to the paucity of manuscripts brought about by heat, humidity, and insects. One Old Javanese manuscript with a date of AD 1334 has survived in Cirebon, West Java, and there may be a handful of others of similar age in the Merapi-Merbabu archive in Central Java (Wiryamartana and van der Molen 2001). Most of the longer Javanese texts written before the sixteenth century are known only from manuscripts of much later date, however. The range of genres represented by these later copies is rather narrow; there are no cookbooks, for example, or fighting manuals. For certain topics we are reliant on accounts written by foreigners, most commonly in Classical Chinese but also in other languages, including Arabic and Latin (see Soedjatmoko 1965 for an early look at these issues). The nature of medieval history in the region is inference made on the basis of sparse evidence.
2 See Pollock (2006) for an account of the role of Sanskrit in pre-modern India and Southeast Asia, and Gonda (1952) for Sanskrit in Indonesia specifically.
Fig. 10.1. A sketch map of Java and its neighbours.
Indianisation
Written history in island Southeast Asia begins with the introduction of writing from India in the form of Sanskrit inscriptions in the Pallava, although it is better known as Late Southern Brāhmī, script in the third or fourth century AD (Hunter 1996). The first Pallava inscriptions in the archipelago appear at Kutai in eastern Borneo, and shortly thereafter in West Java and the Malay Peninsula. This was part of a process commonly termed ‘Indianisation’ wherein elites across Southeast Asia adopted certain features of Indian culture, including Hindu and Buddhist cults, concepts of law and justice, temple architecture, and even the use of war elephants (see Trautmann 2015, chap. 7). The idea of Indianisation was originally developed by the French archaeologist George Cœdès (1944), in whose original formulation the states of Southeast Asia were described as hindouisés – ‘Hinduised’ rather than ‘Indianised’, better reflecting the elite and religious nature of the process. While the terminology suggests Indian impetus, ‘Indianisation’
is now seen as having been led by Southeast Asian elites themselves, picking Indian traits to emulate instead of adopting Indic culture wholesale. Indian influence on Java was nevertheless considerable: All of Java’s languages contain large numbers of Sanskrit loanwords, and occasional Tamil ones as well, including core vocabulary. Significantly, the scripts discussed in this paper were ultimately developed from Indian prototypes.
Medieval Java
It is standard to refer to the era under discussion here as the ‘Hindu-Buddhist’ period, defined in contrast to the later ‘Islamic’ and colonial eras (see, for example, Lunsingh Scheurleer 2012). In truth Java played host to many religious traditions during the Middle Ages, including Hindu, Buddhist, and indigenous cults – and, from at least the fourteenth century, Islam. I use the term ‘medieval’ to refer to this period as it emphasises Java’s connections with the wider world of Afro-Eurasia in the Middle Ages and because it avoids the religious connotations of the prevalent terminology.3 Whatever one calls it, this period begins with the introduction of writing and the process of Indianisation in the middle of the first millennium AD and tapers off at the beginning of the sixteenth century with the arrival of Portuguese conquistadores in Southeast Asia in 1509 (Garcia 2016), the onset of the Columbian Exchange in the wake of European contacts with the Americas (Crosby 1972), and the rapid and at-times-violent growth of Islam in the Indo-Malaysian archipelago after the Portuguese conquest of Melaka in 1511 (Graaf and Pigeaud 2003).
Java’s medieval history is typically divided into three phases: an indeterminate early period (beginnings to ca AD 700); the Central Javanese period (ca 700–928) and the East Javanese period (929–ca 1500) (see Kinney et al. 2003, 21; Rahardjo 2011). In the Central Javanese period, power is believed to have been concentrated in what is now the Indonesian province of Central Java, evidenced by a plethora of Sanskrit and
3 See Ali (2014) for a similar defence of the use of ‘medieval’ in a South Asian context. The term ‘medieval’
has been used in reference to Java before (Vlekke 1945, 27–48), but not in the sense here.
Old Javanese inscriptions and stone buildings, including the mid-ninth-century Hindu temples at Prambanan and the Buddhist candi4 of Borobudur (the largest Buddhist monument in the world) (Miksic 2010). An unexplained break in inscriptions and stone construction in Central Java occurs in AD 928, after which no inscriptions appear in that part of the island until AD 1437. A succession of Javanese-speaking kingdoms based in East Java dominated Java from 929 to the late fifteenth century. The first such kingdom was deliberately split apart by its ruler, Airlaṅga, in the 1040s. The remnants vied for supremacy over the succeeding centuries, beginning with the hegemony of Kaḍiri (1049–1222) and Siṅhasari (1222–1292) and ending with Majapahit (1293–1486?), the latter having been established after a failed Mongol invasion in 1292. These kingdoms were arguably incarnations of what was in reality a single Javanese polity, and it is clear from inscriptions that the rulers of Majapahit saw themselves as the heirs of Siṅhasari.
These labels are, however, standard in Indonesian historiography and have been used in the classification of scripts (particularly so-called ‘Kadiri quadratic’).
In West Java, where people spoke Sundanese, the earliest inscriptions are in Sanskrit in Pallava script and document the existence of a kingdom called Tārūmanagara (‘Kingdom of Indigo’), perhaps based at the Citarum River, in around the fifth century AD. There are few of these inscriptions, however, and Tārūmanagara is ultimately mysterious. After a gap of some centuries, it appears that a kingdom known as Sunda had been established in West Java by the ninth century, as evidenced by the (now lost) Kebonkopi II inscription of AD 854. Modern Sundanese oral tradition refers to a heavily mythologised version of this kingdom as Pajajaran, originally one of the names given to Sunda’s capital city. Sunda was largely independent of the Javanese kingdoms, but Javanese influence on Sunda has been much greater than vice versa, due in part to the lower population density in West Java, a product of the region’s nutrient-poor latosols. The massacre of a Sundanese delegation by the Javanese at Bubat in East Java in 1357 led to lasting enmity between the two peoples (Muhibbiddin 2018); these strained relations may have influenced the development of Sundanese literature and script culture after the fourteenth century.
Javan scripts
Inscriptions and manuscripts
The kingdoms of medieval Java left inscriptions in stone (usually andesite), bronze, copper, and gold, several hundred of which bear dates in the Śaka calendar (Nakada 1982).5 These inscriptions typically establish religious zones, grant tax exemptions, or
4 Candi is the standard name in Indonesia for non-Islamic monuments in stone.
5 The zero-year of the Śaka calendar begins in AD 78, making conversion between the systems trivial.
Most of these dates are inscribed using ‘Hindu’ numerals, which appeared in Southeast Asia some centuries before their first occurrence in Europe. In Java, however, Śaka dates were often written using a complicated and deliberately cryptic system, candra sangkala, in which words represented the numerals, usually in reverse order (see below).