Abstract
More than most other stone inscriptions from pre-Islamic Java, the Minto stone (Sangguran charter) has broad name recognition in Indonesia today. The story of the stone’s removal, more than two hundred years ago during the British occupation of Java, from its original setting in the mountainous area north-west of Malang to its current location at the Minto Estate in the Scottish Borders, has stimulated popular imagination. Given the ever-increasing global relevance of the issue of the repatriation of heritage items to their countries of origin, this prestigious stone stele has become the object of significant media attention and is one of the highest priorities among the artefacts which the Indonesian government hopes to bring home. Compared with how much public attention is given to the issue of where the stone belongs, very little attention has been paid to the textual content of the charter engraved on it. In these pages, we attempt to recentre attention on the inscription as a document of intrinsic historical interest. To this end, we first investigate the provenance of the stone. We then review its heritage status, drawing attention to its significance for the local community. Our focus, however, is on the philological study of the inscribed text, of which we present—for the first time—a complete version. This version is based on direct inspection and high-resolution images of the stone, accompanied by an integral translation reflecting the state of scholarly understanding of Old Javanese epigraphy. The epigraphic core of this study is then followed by a discussion of some of the historical implications of the text. Among the topics we review are the chronology and nature of the shifting of political power from Central to East Java in the tenth century CE as well as the culinary and material aspects of communal feasts in that period.
1 Introduction
On 2 August 928, the village of Sangguran in East Java was demarcated as a sīma (benefice) of a nearby Śaiva temple, by decree of the reigning king, King Wawa. The revenues and labour that would normally have been claimed by royal officials were instead divided into three parts, with two thirds being allocated to the daily offerings and upkeep of the temple. This was a major ceremonial occasion, with large amounts of silver and valuable cloth given to the king, the high ministers of state, and dozens of other officials. One of these dignitaries then made a public invocation, calling upon the gods and the royal ancestors to protect the demarcation and placing terrible curses on anyone who might try to violate its privileges: ‘All the more so if he shall uproot the holy sīma stone.’1 The ceremony concluded with a large feast, at which many kinds of food and drink were consumed, accompanied by music, comedy, and puppetry. The whole event was meticulously described, in neat Javanese letters engraved on a large, andesite stone, for the benefit of posterity.
In early 1812, almost nine centuries later, this stone came to the attention of a Scottish military engineer, Colin Mackenzie, who subsequently shipped it to the Governor-General of India, the first Earl of Minto (1751–1814). The stone was ultimately taken to the earl’s estate on the Scottish Borders, where it remains today. The tenth-century document of a Javanese royal gift was thus transformed into an exotic present for a nineteenth-century British official. That is how the Sangguran charter came to be known as the Minto stone, one of the most historically important objects removed from Indonesia by a colonial power. The repatriation of such objects has been a topic of heated debate since the onset of decolonization after the Second World War, with renewed pressure in recent years for Western nations to restitute objects taken from former colonies.
Despite ongoing interest in the inscription’s colonial history and its status as an emblem of Indonesian cultural heritage, there is still a great deal more to learn about its textual contents. Epigraphical research on the inscription has barely progressed in the last century, since the publication of J.L.A. Brandes’s text edition (1913:42–9, no. XXXI). The accuracy of this edition was limited by the low quality of the photographs Brandes had access to, and no translation or commentary was furnished with it. Subsequent scholarship offered marginal improvements to the reading, particularly at the beginning of the text, and initial attempts at translation. This article offers several major advances in the study of the Sangguran charter: the first comprehensively reliable text edition, a translation into English based on it, and a recasting of its global significance with reference to the latest research on Old Javanese epigraphy and early Javanese history.
2 Provenance
Colin Mackenzie first encountered the massive stone stele containing the Sangguran charter at the town of Bangil during a tour of East Java in March–April 1812 (Mackenzie 1952:137–51; Gallop 1995:119). A letter from Mackenzie to his personal clerk L.R. Burke, dated 29 March 1812, indicates that the stone came from the general region of Malang.2 This letter instructs Burke ‘to Copy off the Inscription on the large Stone lately arrived from Malang’ (see Appendix A for a transcription of the letter and of Burke’s reply; see also Bastin 1953:274, n. 6). In the letter to Burke, Mackenzie also ordered that John Newman produce a drawing of the stone, which is now held in the British Library and bears the title Ancient monument & inscription from Malang with the costume of muntrees [mantris] & other official servants, at Bangil, 2nd April 1812 (Figure 1).3 A year later, in a letter dated 11 April 1813 and addressed to Lord Minto, Mackenzie makes it clear that the stone had been ‘carried down with the consent & by the assistance of the Native Regent from Malang’ to Surabaya for onward shipment.4 The implication seems to be that it was moved from its original location at Mackenzie’s behest, though the available evidence does not make this fully clear. We have not found any source that explains how Mackenzie first came to know about the stone.
Figure 1
Drawing of the Minto stone by John Newman (1812)
Citation: Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde / Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia 180, 2-3 (2024) ; 10.1163/22134379-bja10060
British Library, WD953, f. 83 (94)Stamford Raffles, who was Mackenzie’s immediate superior, stated in his pioneering publication The history of Java that the stone had been ‘found near Surabaya’ (Raffles 1817, II: ccxxi). This was a misleadingly vague statement, and despite clear indications that the stone did not originate from anywhere particularly close to Surabaya, Raffles’s inaccurate provenance was taken for granted by subsequent scholars (for instance, Cohen Stuart 1875:xv).5 It was not until the early twentieth century that this error was corrected in the scholarly literature. Kern (1915) noted that the opening Sanskrit verse of Sangguran is identical to that of the Sugih Manek charter,6 which was found in the vicinity of Candi Singosari (Singosari Temple) near Malang in 915 CE (Brandes 1887:359). On this basis, Kern suggested that the Sangguran charter probably originated from Singosari. A connection with the Malang area is further supported by the fact that the inscription is primarily concerned with a place called ‘Manañjuṅ’ (Mananjung in Indonesian spelling), otherwise appearing only in the Sima Anglayang inscription, which almost certainly originates from Malang as well (Titi Surti Nastiti, Eko Bastiawan and Griffiths 2022).7
Figure 2
Map showing the area of provenance of the Minto stone, the modern toponyms identifiable with places mentioned in the charter, as well as find-spots of other inscriptions cited in the article
Citation: Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde / Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia 180, 2-3 (2024) ; 10.1163/22134379-bja10060
The Malang provenance was refined by Krom (1917), who found a reference to the stone in the catalogue of Mackenzie’s private papers (Blagden 1916:24).8 Among these papers is a document entitled ‘Notes made by Colonel Adams on an excursion into the Provinces of Malang and Antang in the month of June 1814’ (shelfmark MSS Eur Mack Private 86.I, 7). Adams reported: ‘At about 4 Paals [that is, 6 kilometres]9 short of Batoe, off the road, Coll. Mackenzie got the large stone with an ancient Inscription’ (p. 107).10 Krom argued that this find-spot was probably in the vicinity of Ngandat. Certain villages mentioned in the Sangguran charter as ‘neighbours’ (B14–17), namely ‘Paṅkuan’, ‘Tugaran’, ‘Ḍahu’, ‘Kḍi-Kḍi’ and ‘Buṅkaliṅan’, can be identified with modern toponyms close to Ngandat: the hamlet of Mbangkon (kelurahan Pendem), the hamlet of Tengaran (kelurahan Mojorejo), the kecamatan of Dau, the village of Ngudi (kelurahan Beji), and the village of Sengkaling (kelurahan Mulyoagung) (Figure 2). These reference points suggest that Ngandat is indeed the strongest candidate for the location of the ancient village of Sangguran, though a direct identification of the Sangguran and Mananjung toponyms with modern place names remains elusive.11
The stone was sent as a gift for Lord Minto.12 In April 1813, it was sent on the ship Matilda from Batavia to Calcutta (that is, from present-day Jakarta to Kolkata), where it was received in June (Gallop 1995:119). Accompanying the inscription was a letter from Mackenzie (dated 11 April), suggesting that it be taken to Minto’s hereditary estate on the Scottish Borders, as a monument to British imperialism and oriental studies:13
Should your Lordship think it an object worthy of preservation at your Paternal Seat, it might at some future day call to remembrance an Event that will always be deemed interesting to the Nation at large, the incorporation of Java into the British Empire. On the banks of the Teviot it might some day afford to British Orientalists an object of pleasing & useful speculation of Asiatic Literature.14
Minto was already thinking along similar lines before Mackenzie’s letter reached him on 27 June. He told Raffles in a letter dated four days earlier (23 June) that ‘I shall be very much tempted to mount this Javan rock upon our Minto Craigs, that it may tell eastern tales of us, long after our heads are under smoother stones’ (quoted in Raffles 1817, II:ccxxi). And so it was done: the great stele was taken to Scotland, though its new owner died before ever being able to see the gift installed in his garden.
3 History of Research
The Sangguran charter became an object of study shortly after it was obtained by Mackenzie. Documents containing eye copies and translations of several East Javanese inscriptions, including Sangguran, were prepared by Captain Leyson Hopkin Davey (1782–1872), with the assistance of a Javanese aristocrat, the Panembahan Natakusuma II, alias Paku Nataningrat, Lord of Sumenep (r. 1811–1854) (Raffles 1817, I:190, 370; Friederich 1854–1857:4–5). Each of these consisted of an eye copy of the original Kawi script of the artefact, a transliteration into Modern Javanese script,15 and a phrase-by-phrase translation into Modern Javanese language; these three parallel texts are organized in an interlinear fashion on the page (Figure 3). On the basis of these Javanese translations, Davey produced English translations of the three inscriptions now known as Sangguran (928), Cane (1021), and Kudadu (1294), which were subsequently published by Raffles as Appendix I of The history of Java (Raffles 1817, II:ccxxi–ccxxx). Unlike Davey’s eye copies of Cane and Kudadu (see Appendix B), the current whereabouts of the Sangguran eye copy are unknown; it is possible that it has not survived to the present day.
Figure 3
Eye copy of the Hantang inscription (top of front face) with a transliteration into Modern Javanese script and a phrase-by-phrase translation into Modern Javanese language by Panembahan Sumenep Natakusuma
Citation: Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde / Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia 180, 2-3 (2024) ; 10.1163/22134379-bja10060
British Library, MSS Jav 95 (formerly India Office Library collection). Available atThe accuracy of the translations published by Raffles was indirectly criticized by John Crawfurd (1820:213), though he himself had published a similar translation (Crawfurd 1816). Indeed, all these early translations of inscriptions are entirely unreliable, even to the point of lacking any connection with the true contents of the inscriptions ostensibly translated, due to the fact that the British pioneers lacked proficiency in the Old Javanese language and were unable to detect that their informant lacked such proficiency as much as they did themselves (Friederich 1854–1857:4; Sastrawan 2021:190). Kern judged that Raffles and later scholars ‘had been the victims of a Javanese mystification’ (Notulen […] van het Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen, XIV, 1876:100). Krom echoed this language by describing Raffles’s published translations as a ‘mystification-translation’ (cited in Brandes 1913:42).
The Sangguran charter was one of the sources used in Wilhelm von Humboldt’s monumental study of Old Javanese, which also included an eye copy of a small part of face B (1836–1839, I:215–33; II, plate IX). Von Humboldt drew on the translations supplied by Raffles, though he was less sceptical of their accuracy than Crawfurd had been.16 The plate published by Von Humboldt was the basis of the partial edition published by A.B. Cohen Stuart (1875:XV–XVII, 37, no. XXIX), which covered only lines B19–B23.
Cohen Stuart made further attempts to read the Sangguran charter before his death in 1876. He had received photographs of the stone from Walter Elliot, a relative of the third Earl of Minto (1814–1891), through the intermediation of Kern and his friend John Muir. Unfortunately, the first batch of photographs received were poorly lit, with many portions of the stone rendered illegible (Cohen Stuart 1875:XVI). Cohen Stuart had prepared a provisional transcription on the basis of these photographs, with the assistance of Kern. Furthermore, he had apparently been allowed to borrow the Raffles-era facsimile of the inscription from the India Office Library and taken it with him to Batavia for further study (Notulen 1876:98–100). After Cohen Stuart’s death, two photographs and his provisional transcription were found among his papers in Batavia. It seems that these items were then sent to Kern in Leiden at his request (Notulen 1876:106), though a manuscript that remains in the National Library in Jakarta (KBG 42) contains a transcription of the Sangguran charter that we strongly suspect is Cohen Stuart’s own work or a copy of it.17
As mentioned above, the first complete edition of the text was included in Brandes’s Oud-Javaansche oorkonden, posthumously edited by Krom (Brandes 1913:42–9, no. XXXI). This edition was based on the photographs ordered by Cohen Stuart, which seem to have reached Batavia by the mid 1880s.18 These photographs were supplemented by Cohen Stuart’s transcription, which allowed Brandes to fill in certain blanks that were illegible on the photographs, such as the final two digits of the year numeral (Brandes 1913:42).
Kern (1915) offered an improved reading of the opening Sanskrit stanza by comparing it with an identical stanza found in the Sugih Manek inscription (see § 7.2 below). In his various historical publications, Krom made some corrections and improvements to Brandes’s readings (1931:198–202). Krom also offered a useful bibliography of research on the stone and other antiquities from Ngandat (Krom 1923:33, no. 2272). Louis-Charles Damais reread lines A3–A6 for his analysis of the inscription’s date (Damais 1955:102–3, A. 106; see also § 7.1 below). Himansu Bhusan Sarkar revised Brandes’s edition by integrating the various improvements by Kern, Krom, and Damais, while himself filling in some gaps based on parallel passages in other inscriptions (Sarkar 1971–1972:227–48). Sarkar’s English rendition of the text was the first complete translation into any language.
The Indonesian epigraphist Hasan Djafar reportedly consulted estampages of the stone in Leiden in 1984–1985, under the guidance of J.G. de Casparis.19 He published an article in Indonesian that contained a history of research to date, a summary of the inscription’s contents, and a discussion of its historical implications (Hasan Djafar 2010). However, this publication lacked an edition or a translation of the text itself. It appears that Hasan Djafar’s edition and translation have been circulated informally, as they were included in the corpus of Old Javanese inscriptions not held in the National Museum, compiled by Edhie Wurjantoro but not formally published.20 Hasan Djafar’s edition was also used for the production of a replica of the Sangguran stela in Ngandat (see below). Finally, we know that the Japanese scholar Kozo Nakada visited the Minto estate several times to read the stone and produce estampages, but no publication seems to have resulted from these visits either.21
This history of research on the Sangguran charter, long and multifaceted as it is, has left ample scope for improvement of the decipherment and interpretation of the inscription. Of all previously published editions, only Brandes’s edition was complete and based on inspection of mechanical reproductions. Sarkar’s edition was almost completely derived from Brandes’s, while Hasan Djafar’s unpublished edition also seems to have used Brandes’s publication as a base text, offering only marginal improvements on the basis of the Leiden estampages. Unlike any previous edition, ours is based on a direct inspection of the stone in Scotland, supplemented by the powerful tool of 3D photogrammetric modelling to enhance the legibility of difficult inscriptions. This has allowed us to make significant advances in deciphering parts of the text that have been previously illegible, to improve the reliability of the entire text edition, and on this basis to cast new light on the inscription’s historical significance. Given the remarkable similarities between the Sangguran charter and those issued by the prolific King Sindok (discussed below), we have also benefited from ongoing advances in research on the Sindok corpus, including the very recently discovered Masahar inscription.
4 Cultural Heritage
The independent Republic of Indonesia considered certain significant artefacts to be emblems of the new nation’s cultural heritage. As the worldwide process of decolonization gathered pace through the 1960s and 1970s, debates arose about the ownership status of artefacts like the Minto stone. Many of the finest objects had always remained in Indies/Indonesian territory, such as the collections of the Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen (Batavian Society for Arts and Sciences) that subsequently became Indonesian government property. However, some important specimens of Indonesian art and culture had been taken overseas during the colonial period. The presence of these artefacts on foreign soil was a source of concern for the Indonesian government, clearly expressed in negotiations with Dutch authorities throughout the period 1949 to 1975 (Van Beurden 2017:125–49). While far from smooth, these negotiations resulted in some tangible acts of restitution in the 1970s, in which key items of significance were repatriated from the Netherlands to Indonesia. These included two paintings by the renowned nineteenth-century painter Raden Saleh, a manuscript of the fourteenth-century Deśavarṇana chronicle, a thirteenth-century statue of the Buddhist deity Prajñāpāramitā, and the regalia of the nineteenth-century Javanese prince Diponegoro.
In recent years, the discourse of repatriation has once again gained prominence in Indonesia and the Netherlands. Ongoing negotiations between the Indonesian and Dutch authorities resulted in the repatriation of objects acquired in the colonial period from the Nusantara Museum in Delft (in 2020), the Ethnology Museum in Leiden (in 2023), and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (in 2023).22 Indonesian representatives have consistently favoured the return of small numbers of unique objects of major historical significance. Even back in 1975, the Indonesian delegation prioritized the return of objects ‘regarded as significant creations of Indonesian thinkers and artists’, ‘as evidence of momentous or memorable historical events’, and ‘with a special appeal to the aesthetic feelings of Indonesians’, while recognizing that ‘not all Indonesian cultural objects located in foreign countries ought to be returned’.23 It is the most outstanding individual artefacts that matter most to the repatriation discourse in Indonesia.
The short British rule of the East Indies (1811–1816) resulted in a voluminous transfer of Indonesian cultural objects to Britain and India, largely through administrator-collectors like Raffles, Mackenzie, and Crawfurd. These objects have not received the same level of attention from the Indonesian government and in the Indonesian public imagination as those held in the Netherlands. Nevertheless, they include some of the most significant sources for premodern Javanese history: the Pucangan inscription, also known as the Calcutta stone (1041), and a large number of historical manuscripts from the Yogyakarta royal palace. To this list can be added the Sangguran charter (928), which is the oldest known Javanese and, thereby, Indonesian text to have made its way to the United Kingdom. The stone remains the property of the current Earl of Minto, who has shown openness to the idea of repatriating the artefact to Indonesia (Bullough and Carey 2016:5).
Figure 4
The annual commemoration of the inauguration of the Sangguran stone, August 2023. The reproduction of the inscription stands in the background.
Citation: Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde / Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia 180, 2-3 (2024) ; 10.1163/22134379-bja10060
Photo by Eko BastiawanIn lieu of the Minto stone’s physical presence, Indonesians have found alternative ways to engage with its heritage value. In recent decades, the local community of Ngandat, which Krom identified as the likely find-spot of the stone, has come to view itself as the present-day continuation of tenth-century Sangguran. Ngandat is home to the Dhammadīpa Ārāma, one of the largest Theravada Buddhist monasteries in Indonesia. According to the caretaker, the location chosen for the monastery at its founding in 1971 was influenced by the belief that this was the site where the Minto stone originally stood.24 In 2020, residents produced a replica of the stele at this location, using Hasan Djafar’s edition (see p. 11) as the base text for the engraving. The procession of installing the replica partly followed the procedures stated in the inscription, with the presence of a local Hindu priest to lead the ritual, a feast which included an interpretation of some food items mentioned in the text (see also § 7.6), and traditional dance performances in conclusion. Since then, every month of August (see § 7.1), the local residents commemorate the inauguration of the Sangguran charter, an event that we witnessed in 2023 (Figure 4). According to our informants, the main purpose of this now annual event is to remind the residents that the stone was once an important part of the community in the hope that it could be returned to this community sooner or later. The prestige of the Sangguran charter is also demonstrated by the recent naming of temple remains discovered in Pendem village as ‘Candi Mananjung’, based on the inscription’s mention of this structure as the main beneficiary of the grant.25
5 The Inscription
5.1 Artefact
The Minto stone is a stele with flat front-and-back faces that narrow slightly towards the bottom, and a rounded top with a sharp point in the middle. It is relatively well preserved, with text clearly visible on three of its faces, namely the front, the back, and the right-hand lateral face. The text ends on this last face, the entire left-hand lateral face being blank. The stone’s dimensions are 194 cm (height), 128 cm (width), and 35 cm (depth), as recorded during our visit in June 2022 (Figure 5). The base of the Minto stone takes the form of a lotus, measuring 120 cm (width) and 54 cm (depth). The latter feature is commonly observed in stone inscriptions issued in Java. Noteworthy features of the lettering include:
-
the use of ma among the symbols separating the Sanskrit stanza from the body of the charter (A2)
-
ornamental flourishes applied to cakra in sarvvatra (A2), nakṣatra (A3), pratidina (A9), rakryān (A10), miśra-paramiśra (A11), kriṁ (A12—the ornament takes up an unusual amount of space in the line here), bhrāṣṭa (B36), prakāra (B42)
-
ornamental tarung observed in lokaḥ (A2), bhaṭāra (A10), kevalā (A17), tibākan· (B37), saṅa-saṅān· (B41)
On rather frequent occasions, cracks in the stone seem to have pre-dated the engraving, and they tend to have been avoided by the engraver; on rare occasions, these cracks affect the legibility of the text. There are also some blanks left by the engraver to avoid descenders from the previous line. Finally, there are some spaces left blank for no evident reason.
The last line of face A and the first two of face B seem to be additions made after the main body of the text had been laid out, as A37 is continued on B3. The additional lines A38 and B1–2 are very worn, and it remains unclear where precisely in the main text their contents were intended to be inserted.
5.2 Editorial Conventions
We adopt the transliteration system recommended by the DHARMA project (Balogh and Griffiths 2020) and use the following editorial signs:
| (xyz) |
reading of text is unclear |
| [xyz] |
elements lost or illegible due to damage to support: the symbol × marks a number of illegible characters while the symbol + a number of lost ones |
| ⟨xyz⟩ |
text omitted by engraver, supplied by editors |
| ⟨⟨xyz⟩⟩ |
superfluous text engraved, to be ignored by reader |
| ⟦xyz⟧ |
text erased by the engraver |
| ⊔ |
space left blank due to interfering descender from previous line |
| □ |
space left blank due to defect on the support |
| _ |
space left blank for undetermined reason |
| : |
tarung to express long pepet |
Figure 5
The stone at Minto Estate
Citation: Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde / Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia 180, 2-3 (2024) ; 10.1163/22134379-bja10060
Photo by Timothy Minto, April 2024We have decided not to cite variant readings from previous editions in a critical apparatus, as the edition of Brandes, as well as the ones by Sarkar and by Hasan Djafar that are largely based on it, was based on unsatisfactory reproductions and hence provisional in nature. If we disregard the merely apparent differences caused by the use of different transliteration systems, our edition contains around 400 differences of reading when compared to the previous editions. Many of the variant readings pertain to relatively trivial matters such as the presence of an anusvāra (ṁ) or a punctuation sign ignored by Brandes. The text as it is inscribed on the stone is actually rather sparsely punctuated, so we have seen fit to supply punctuation in various places to clarify the structure and meaning of the text, though we could have made such interventions much more often. Minor variants of reading between us and our predecessors also apply to the vowel distinctions a/ā (sometimes grammatically significant, as word-final ā may imply the presence of an irrealis suffix), i/ī, u/ū, e/ai, and o/au; or to generally inconsequential consonant distinctions such as k/kh and b/v. But a significant number of variant readings concern gaps in the text that we have been able to fill in, or changes that affect the meanings of words or else the representation of proper names.
5.3 Text Edition
For face A, see Figure 6; for face B, Figure 7; and for face c, Figure 8.
5.3.1 Sanskrit Invocation
A1 // ⊙ // Avighnam astu//
5.3.2 Sanskrit Stanza in Āryā Metre
Figure 6
Sangguran, front face (A)
Citation: Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde / Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia 180, 2-3 (2024) ; 10.1163/22134379-bja10060
Orthophoto from a photogrammetric model by Adeline LevivierFigure 7
Sangguran, back face (B)
Citation: Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde / Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia 180, 2-3 (2024) ; 10.1163/22134379-bja10060
Orthophoto from a photogrammetric model by Adeline LevivierFigure 8
Sangguran, lateral face right (c)
Citation: Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde / Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia 180, 2-3 (2024) ; 10.1163/22134379-bja10060
Orthophoto from a photogrammetric model by Adeline Levivier5.3.3 Body of the Old Javanese Charter
A3 // svasti śaka-varṣātīta 850 śravaṇa-māsa tithi caturdaśi śukla-pakṣa, vu‚ ka‚ śa‚ vāra‚ hastā-nakṣatra, viṣṇu-devatā‚ sobhāgya-A4(yo)ga,
Irikā divasani Ājñă śrī mahārāja, rakai paṅkaja dyaḥ vava śrī vijayalokanāmostuṅga,29 tinaḍaḥ rakryān· mapatiḥ I hino (pu si)A5(ṇḍo)k· śrī Īśānavikrama, Umiṅsor· I samgat· momah-umaḥ kāliḥ maḍaṇḍər· pu padma‚ Aṅgəhan· pu kuṇḍala, kumonakan· Ikanaṁ vaA6(nu)A I saṁ□guran· vatak· vaharu‚ gavai mā 2 puṅguhan·30 tapak· mas· su 6 sīmān· susukan· denīkanaṁ punta I manañjuṁ maṅaran· ḍaṅ ācāryya (ḍa)A7[1×]li(ci)khya‚ muAṁ si dahil· _ (s)y aṅgudī, səpət·, ḍa pu jambaṁ, kəsək·, ḍa pu bhairava, basya‚ lukiṁ‚ bhaṇḍa‚ tamblaṁ, haḍaṁ‚ cigər·‚ ḍa pu ruyut· A8vilaṁ, kañju, durdig·, suji⟨,⟩ sugas·, Arpaṇākna I bhaṭāra I saṁ hyaṁ prasāda kabha_ktyan· Iṁ sīma kajuru-gusalyan· I manañjuṁ, paknānya sīma punpunaA9na bhaṭāra, Umahayva Asiṁ samananā I saṁ hyaṁ dharmma □ saṅkānaniṁ śiva-caru-nivedya I bhaṭāra prātidina,
maṅkana Iṣṭa-⊔prayojana śrī mahāA10rāja muAṁ rakryān· mapatiḥ rikanaṁ vanuA I saṅguran· Inarpaṇnākan· I bhaṭāra I saṁ hyaṁ prāsāda kabhaktyan· Iṁ sīma kajuru-gusalyan· I manañjuṁ A11māri ⟨vatak·⟩ vaharu⟨,⟩ parṇnahanya svatantra tan· katamāna deniṁ patiḥ va□huta muAṁ saprakāraniṁ maṅilala drabya haji Iṁ daṅū‚ miśra para-miśra vulu-vulu A12prakāra, paṅuraṁ(,) kriṁ, paḍam·, manimpiki, paranakan·, limus galuḥ‚ paṅa(ru)han·, taji‚ vatu tajam·‚ sukun·‚ halu varak·‚ rakadut·⟨,⟩ A13pinilai, kataṅgaran·, tapa haji, Air haji, malandaṁ, L̥ca, L̥blab·‚ kalaṁkaṁ, kutak·‚ taṅkil·, tr̥pan·, salvit·‚ tuha dagaṁ, juru gusali‚ A14tuhān ⟨n⟩ambi, tuhān huñjaman·, tuhān juḍi‚ juru jalir·, pamaṇikan·, miśra hino‚ vli hapū, vli vaduṁ‚ vli tambaṁ‚ vli pañjut·‚ vli haR̥ṁ‚ pabisar·‚ palamak·⟨,⟩ A15pakaluṅkuṁ, Urutan·, dampulan·, tpuṁ kavuṁ‚ suṁsuṁ paṅuraṁ‚ pasuk alas·, payuṅan·, sipat· vilut·, pāṅin-aṅin·, pamāvaśya, puluṁ paA16ḍi, skar ta⊔hun·‚ panrāṅan·, panusuḥ, hopan·‚ sambal· sumbul·⟨,⟩ hulun· haji pamr̥□ṣi vatak· I jro, Ityaivamādi tan tamā Irikanaṁ vaA17nuA śīma I saṁguran·, kevalā bhaṭāra I saṁ hyaṁ prāsāda kabhaktyān· Iṁ sīma kajuru-gusalyān· I manañjuṁ Ataḥ pramāṇā I sadr̥bya-hajinya kabaiḥ⟨,⟩
A18samaṅkana ⊔ Ikanaṁ sukha-duḥkha kady āṅgāniṁ mayaṁ tan· pavvaḥ‚ valū rumambat· Iṁ natar·‚ vipa⊔ti⟨,⟩ vaṅkai kābunān·, rāḥ kasavur· Iṁ daA19lan·, văk·-capalā‚ duhilatan·, hidu kasirat·, hasta-capalā⟨,⟩ mami⊔jilakan· turaḥniṁ kikir·‚ mamūk·⟨,⟩ mamumpaṁ, ludān·‚ tūtaA20n·, ḍaṇḍa kuḍaṇḍa⟨,⟩ bhaṇḍihalādi, bhaṭāra I saṁ hyaṁ prāsāda kabhaktyān· Ataḥ parānani drabya-hajinya,
kūnaṁ Ikanaṁ miśra‚ mañambul·⟨,⟩ A21mañaṁvriṁ, maṁlākha, maṅubar·‚ matarub·‚ maṅapus·‚ manūla vu□ṅkuḍu‚ maṁgula‚ maṁdyun·‚ maṁhapū‚ mamubut·‚ maṁluruṁ‚ maga⊔vai A22ruṅki, payuṁ vlū, mopiḥ‚ Akajaṁ, magavai □ kī□sī⟨,⟩ maṅanam-a⊔nam·, manavaṁ, manahəb·, mamisaṇḍuṁ manuk·‚ makala-kalā A23kapva ya tribhāgā⊔n· dra(b)ya-hajinya, sadūmān· Umarā □ I bha□ṭāra, sadūman· Umarā I saṁ makmitan· sīma, sadūman maparaha I saṁ maṅilala drabya haji,
A24kapva Ikanaṁ masambyavahāra hana ṅkāna hiniṁ-hīṅan· kv(ai)hanya⟨,⟩ Anuṁ tan· knā de saṁ maṅilala drabya ha⊔ji‚ tluṁ tuhān· Iṁ sasambyavahāra Iṁ sasīA25ma, yan paṅulaṁ kbo 20 sapi 40 vḍus· 80 Aṇḍaḥ savantayan·‚ maguluṅan· tluṁ pasaṁ, maṅaraḥ tluṁ lumpaṁ‚ paṇḍai sobuba⊔n·‚ paḍahi tluṁ taṁA26kilan·‚ (ma)titiḥ sakulit·, Uṇḍahagi satuhān·, macadar pataṁ pacadaran·, pa□rahu 1 masuṁhara 3 tan patuṇḍāna, yāpvan pinikul· dagaṁnya kaA27dy a(ṅgā)niṁ mabasana, ma(sayaṁ), makacapuri, maṅuñjal·, maṅavari, kapas·‚ vuṅku(ḍ)u, vsi, tambaga‚ gaṁsa‚ timaḥ, paḍat·, pamaja, vuyaḥ‚ lṅa‚ bras·, gu(la)⟨,⟩ A28bsar·‚ kasumba, saprakāraniṁ dval· pinikul· kalima vantal· Iṁ satuhān· pikul-pikulananya Iṁ sasīma □ (I)kanaṁ samaṅkana tan· knāna de saṁ maṅilaA29la drabya haji, saparānanya sadeśanya, ndān· makmitana ya tulis· maṅkai lvīranya‚ yāpvan· lbiḥ saṅkā rikanaṁ sapaṁhīṁ Iriya‚ knāna śakalbiḥnya31 de saṁ maṅilala A30so(dhā)ra haji tan· (A)□dhikāna,
Irikanaṁ kāla maṅasəĀkan· Ikanaṁ punta I manañjuṁ pasak·-pasak· I śrī mahārāja pirak· kā 1 vḍihan· taA31pis· yu 1⟨,⟩ rakryān· mapatiḥ I hino śrī Īśānavikrama InaṁsəĀn· (pasak-pa)sak· pirak· kā 1 vḍihan· tapis· yu 1⟨,⟩ (ra)kai sirikan· pu maraiA32ndra, rakai vka pu balyaṁ, samgat· momah-(u)maḥ kāliḥ maḍaṇdər·, Aṅgəhan· InaṁsəĀn· pasak-pasak· pirak· dhā 5 vḍihan· yu 1 sovaṁ-sovaṁ⟨,⟩ A33tiruAn· ḍa punta taritip·, Amrāti havaṁ vicakṣaṇa, pulu vatu pu paṇḍamuAn·‚ halaran· pu guṇottama, maṁhuri pu maṅuvil·, vadihati A34pu dinakara‚ makudur· pu balavān·, InaṁsəĀn· pasak-pasak· pirak· dhā 1 mā 4 vḍihan· yu 1 sovaṁ,
vaharu rikaṁ kālaṁ pu variga InaṁsəA35Ān· pasak-pasak· pirak· dhā (1) ⟨mā⟩ 4 vḍihan· (y)u 1⟨,⟩ samgat· Anakbi dhā 7 mā 8 kain· vlaḥ 1⟨,⟩ saṁ tuhān· I vaharu vinaiḥ pasak-pasak· A36pirak· dhā 6 kinabai(ḥ)hanira,
tuhān· I vadihati 2 mira-miraḥ saṁ halaṁ pahu(ṁ), halara⊔n· saṁ suddhyā(sth)a(,) (tu)hān· I makudur· 2 vatu A37valaiṁ saṁ (bhū/ra)te, [2×] saṁ vari⊔ṅin·, paṅura(ṁ) I vadihati saṁ ra vuṅu, manuṅgu saṁ hovaṅka, paṅuraṁ I makudur· saṁ ra kvəl·‚ manuṅgu saṁ (ku)B3lumpaṁ‚ vinaiḥ pasak-pasak· pirak· mā 1, vḍihan· yu 1 sovaṁ-sovaṁ,
saṁ tuhān· I pakaraṇān· makabaihan· juru (ka)[na](ya)kā□n· B4I hino samgat· guṇuṅan· pu tun·tun·‚ juru vadvā rarai, saṁ ra guyu‚ juru kalula pu vali, kaṇḍamuhi saṁ geṣṭa, parujar· I siriB5kan· hujuṁ galuḥ, I vka viri⊔diḥ, I kanuruhan· saṁ rokat, I sbaṁ saṁ vimala‚ I bavaṁ saṁ jalaṁ, I maḍaṇḍər· saṁ cakra, ryy āṅgəhan· saṁ tuB6han·, I tiruAn· sumuḍan· ḍa punta saṅgama, I hujuṁ saṁ pavuduka⊔n· vinaiḥ pasak-pasak· pira⊔k· dhā 2 mā 8 kinabaihanira,
saṁ citrale⟨kha⟩ B7I hino pasak-pasak· dhā 2 mā 8 kinabai(han)i(ra), patiḥ juru kāliḥ vasaḥ saṁ kulumpaṁ, kuci saṁ ra kavil·(,) pasak-pasak· dhā 1 mā 4 sovaṁ-soB8vaṁ, parujarnya piṁsor hyaṁ paskaran·, pasak-pasak· pirak· (mā 5) sovaṁ-sovaṁ,
lumaku manusuk· I vadihati saṁ kamala, (l)umaku manusuk· I makudur· saṁ tajaB9(m·) □ I su(su)han· saṁṅ astuti saṁ balā, I tapa haji saṁ pacintān· vinaiḥ pasak-pasak· dhā 1 vḍihan· yu 1 sovaṁ-sovaṁ,
patiḥ I kanuruhan· [.]i [4×] saṁ (jā)ta B10patiḥ I hujuṁ saṁ kahyunan·, patiḥ ⟨I⟩ vaharu saṁ nīla‚ patiḥ I tugaran· saṁ □ mala, patiḥ (p)amgat· I vaharu saṁ gambo‚ patiḥ paṅkur· saṁ maṅka, saṁ raṅga vinaiḥ pasak-pasak· dhā 1 vḍiB11han· yu 1 sovaṁ-sovaṁ,
patiḥ lampuran· saṁ prasama, pasak-pasak· pirak· mā 8 vḍihan· hlai 1 parujar patiḥ si manohara pa⊔sak-pasak· dhā 1 vḍihan· yu 1⟨,⟩ parujar patiḥ I kaB12nuru□han· si ja□lu□k·, si rambət‚ parujar patiḥ I vaharu si bṅal·⟨,⟩ si tañjak·, si cacu‚ pasak-pasak· pirak· mā 8 vḍihan· hlai 1 sovaṁ-sovaṁ, (va)[hu]ta I vaharu si baB13lu□syak· □ si kəndul·, tuha kalaṁ‚ vinaiḥ pasak-pasak· dhā 1 vḍihan· yu 1 sovaṁ-sovaṁ, piluṅgaḥ si rāji‚ si bantan·‚ piṇḍat·32 (vi)[naiḥ] vḍihan· hlai 1 B14sovaṁ□-sovaṁ,
rāma □ tpi si⊔riṁ milu pinakasākṣīniṁ manusuk· sĭma⟨,⟩ I tugaran· gusti si lakṣita, tuha kalaṁ si yogya‚ vinaiḥ pasak-pasa⊔k· pirak· B15mā 8 vḍihan· (yu) 1 □ sovaṁ-sovaṁ‚ I kajavān·⟨,⟩33 I pavaṅkuAn·⟨,⟩ si surā‚ I kḍi⊔-kḍi si pahaṁ, I buṁkaliṅan· si tiñjo‚ Iṁ kapatihan· si piṅul·, B16I ḍahu si tambas· vinaiḥ pasak-pasak· pirak· mā 4 sovaṁ‚ pa⊔tiḥ I vuṅa-vuṅa pirak· mā 4⟨,⟩ ri(ṁ) papanahan· vinkas· si mañjava⊔(t)·‚ I kajar· kulapati si B17kaṇḍi, I tampur· si təṅəran· vinaiḥ pasak-pasak· pirak· mā 4 sovaṁ,
si mañā si kəsək· si vudalū si kudi‚ matətə(ṅə)n·, si luluk· vinaiḥ pasak· pirak· B18mā 4 vḍihan· hlai 1 sovaṁ‚ Abañol· si lulut·‚ si s(p)at·, si hiR̥ṁ‚ vinaiḥ vḍihan· hlai 1 sovaṁ, Avayaṁ si rahina pirak· mā 4 vḍihan· yu 1 saṁ boddhi‚ saṁ mārgga‚ viB19naiḥ vḍihan· yu 1 sovaṁ,
I tlasniṁ mavaiḥ pasak-pasak· muAṁ vḍihan· I sira kabaiḥ pinarṇnaḥ Ikanaṁ saji I saṁ makudur· I sorniṁ vitāna‚ maṅārgha ta saṁ pinakaviku B20sumaṅask(āra) Ikanaṁ susuk· muAṁ kulumpaṁ, maṇḍiri ta saṁ makudur· maṅañjali I saṁ hyaṁ təAs· maluṅguḥ I sorniṁ vitāna‚ mān·dlan· pāda humaR̥ppakan· saṁ hyaṁ təB21As·, masiṅhal· vḍihan· yu 1 tumŭt saṁ va⊔dihati, lumkas· saṁ makudur· maṅuyut· manətə⊔k· gulūniṁ hayām·‚ linaṇḍəssakan· Iṁ kulumpaṁ, mama⊔ntiṅaB22kan· han·tlū Iṁ vatu sīma, mamaṁmaṁ manapathe saminaṁmaṁnira daṅū‚ I katguhakna saṁ hyaṁ vatu sīma‚ Ikana līṁnira‚
Īndaḥ ta kita kamuṁ hyaṁ I baprakeśvara AB23[ga]sti mahā⊔R̥ṣi pūrvva dakṣiṇa paścimottara maddhya Ūrddha(m adha)ḥ ravi śaśī kṣi⊔ti jala pavana hūtāśana yajamānākāśa dha⊔rmma Ahorātra saB24ndhyā hr̥daya, ya⊔k(ṣ)a rāk(ṣ)asa pisāca pre⊔tāsura garuḍa gandharvva catvāri lokapāla, yama varuṇa kuvai(ra) bāśava muAṁ putra devaB25⊔tā pañcakuśika‚ nandīśvara mahākāla ṣadvinā□yaka nāgarājā dū⊔rggādevī caturāśra, Ananta surendra, (A)nanta hyaṁ kālamr̥tyu B26gaṇabhū⊔ta kita pra⊔siddha maṁrakṣa kaḍatva□n· śrī mahārāja I mḍaṁ I(ṁ) bhūmi matarā⊔m· kita Umi⊔lu ma⊔narīra, Umasuk iṁ sarvva-B27sarīra kita sakala sākṣī-bhūta tumon madoḥ lāvan mapaR̥̄‚ riṁ rahina‚ riṁ vṅi At· ḍəṅəĀkan· ta Ikeṁ samaya sapatha sumpaḥ pamaṁmaṁma⊔B28mi ri kita hiyaṁ kabaiḥ,
yāvat· Ikanaṁṅ vaṁ (du)rācāra tan mā⊔gum tan· makmit· Irikeṁ sapatha sinrāhakan· saṁ vahuta hyaṁ kudur·‚ hadyan· hulun· matuha raB29rai laki-laki vadvan·‚ viku grahastha muAṁ patiḥ vahuta rāma A⊔siṁ Umu⊔lah-ulaḥ Ikeṁ vanuA I saṅguran·‚ sīma Ina⊔rpaṇākan·nikanaṁ punta I manaB30ñjuṁ I bhaṭāra‚ I saṁ hyaṁ prāsāda kabhaktyan· Iṁ sīma kajuru-gusalyan·‚ I dlāhaniṁ dlāha vavaka ta ya⟨,⟩ ṅuni⊔vaiḥ yan ḍavuta saṁ hyaṁ vatu sīma, tasmā⊔t· kaB31⊔buAtaknanya, patyanantāta ya kamuṁ hyaṁ, deyantat pa⊔tīya‚ tatt a_noliha I vuntat·, tat ⟨t⟩iṁhala I likura⊔n·, taruṁ Iṅ adəga⊔n·(,) tampyaB32(l)· I viraṅa⊔n·‚ tutuḥ tuṇḍunya vlaḥ kapālanya sbitakan· vtaṁnya rantann ususnya vtuAkan· ḍalmanya‚ ḍuḍuk· hatīnya paṅan dagiṁnya Inum· rāḥnya təhər pə⊔pəB33(da)kan· vkasakan· prāṇantika, yan· para riṅ alas paṅananniṁ moṁ‚ patukniṁṅ u⊔lā pulīraknaniṁ devamanyu, yan para riṁ tgal· Alappa⊔nniṁ glap· sampalaniṁ rākṣasa, B34[pa]ṅananniṁ vuIl· si pamuṅuAn·,
Araḥ ta kita kamuṁ hyaṁ kuśika gargga metrī kuruṣya pātāñjala, suvuk· lor· suvuk kidu⊔l· suvuk kuluAn· ⟨suvuk·⟩ vaiB35(ta)n·, buAṅakan· ri⊔ṅ ākāśa, salambitakan· I hyaṁ kabaiḥ‚ tibāka⊔n· riṁ mahāsamudra‚ klammakan· Iṁ ḍavuhan· Alapan· saṁ ⟨hyaṁ⟩ jalamm er· duB36dutanniṁ tuviran· saṁhapanniṁ vuhaya‚ ṅkānan matya Ika⊔naṁṅ vaṁ Anyāya lumbur· Ikeṁ vanuA sĭma I saṁgura⊔n·⟨,⟩ Upadravā riṁ devatā bhrāṣṭa liputanni(ṁ) B37ḍira muliha riṁ kanaraka‚34 tibāka⊔n· Iṁ mahārorava⟨,⟩ klan de saṁ yamabala‚ palun de saṁ kiṅkara‚ piṁpitva Ata yan· bimbān· pāpa Ata ya‚ saṁB38sāra sajīvakāla, salvi⟨r⟩niṁ duḥkha paṅguhanya sarūpaniṁ lara hiḍapannya, (m)akelikniṁ maṁjanma dadya(na)nya, Avūka tan· tammuAṁ sāma, vkasakan· havu kairir·, maṅkaB39nā tmahananikanaṁṅ vaṁ Anyāya l(u)mbura Ikeṁ śīma I saṅguran·,
I tlas saṁ makudur maṅu(y)uk·35 masalin ta sira kabaiḥ⟨,⟩ kapva ma⊔luṅguḥ Iṁ tkan pasək· tumūt· krama saṁ B40hana riṁ kon· pa⊔tiḥ vahuta rāma kabayan· muAṁ rāma tpi siriṁ kabaiḥ, matuha manvam laki-laki vadvan· kaniṣṭamaddhyamot⟨t⟩ama‚ tan hana kān(t)un·, Umilu manaḍaḥ riṁ paB41glaran·,
kinuran·-kuran· InaṁsəAn· skul· dandānan·, hinirusan· kla-kla Ambil-ambil·, kasyan· lit-lit· tlu saranak· saṅa-saṅān· haryyas· rumba-ruB42mbaḥ kuluban· tetis· tumpuk-tumpuk· ḍeṁ hañaṁ ḍeṁ hasin· kakap· biluṁluṁ ka⊔ḍivas· huraṁ ka⊔van· laya-layar· hala-hala han(t)iga Inariṁ B43suṇṭa Atak· pəhan·, piṇḍa gaṅan· Iṁ saron· 8 len· sankā riṁ knas· Ivak· prakāra⟨,⟩ Anaḍaḥ ta sira kabaiḥ yathāsuka36 maṅinum· siddhu‚ ciñca, kilaṁ B44(tu)Ak· piṁtiga sovaṁ‚ vinuvuhan· tambul· Inañjapan· k(u)ravu kurima, Asam· dvadval·, kapva madulur malariḥ, Umaṁsə: taṁ jnu, skar·, rujak·⟨,⟩ (Ana)⊔bəḥ ta saṁ B45(ma)tuvuṁ[,]
(maṁḍ)iri ta sira kabaiḥ patiḥ pramu(kha), manambaḥ humarap· I sārah-araḥni(ṁ) kahanā⊔n· śrī mahărāja, muAṁ rakryān· mapa⊔tiḥ, I tlasniṁ manambaḥ maṅic1[gal· rā](vaṇa)-hasta, sampun· saṅkap· Ika[naṁ] c2(I)nig(ə)laka⊔n· maluṅguḥ (sira) muvaḥ vinu(vu)c3[ha]n· tambul· linarihan· piṇḍuA soc4(vaṁ,) Umaṁs(ə): taṁ baṁlus· linarihan· muva[ḥ] c5matlasan· (s)ira kabaiḥ kapuA muliḥ Ic6y umaḥnira,
I kahlammanya gumanti Ikanaṁ r[ā]c7(ma) I saṅguran· (mu)Aṁ Ikanaṁ punta I manañjuṁ c8lāvan· saṁ Umyāpāra Ikanaṁ susuka⊔n· c9[s]ĭ(ma) vinaiḥ manaḍaha, Ikanaṁ mabaṅoc10[l·] si lulut· si spat· si hiraṁ kapva c11[Umi]ntonakan· guṇanya, Irikanaṁ vṅi manaṁc12gap· ta sirăvayaṁ maṅaran· rahina,
nāc13han· kramanikanaṁ susukan· sīma I sac14ṅguran·, s⟦u⟧mpun·37 samprayukta, likhita c15citralekha I hino lakṣaṇa // ⊙ //
5.3.4 Extra Lines at the Bottom of A and Top of B
A38[5×] (vinai)ḥ pirak· pasak-pasak· vḍihan· yu 1 sovaṁ-sovaṁ⟨,⟩ ri s(th)iranya vanu(A) I saṁguran· [8 × 1+]
B1prayatnakna [6×] lava [6×] Atavakadusīrahi kvaiḥ, Aṅuṅguṅ i vka [3×] paṅura
B2 [2×] lunavuhak· [4×] t· Ahalulu [3×] vvaye katmuAni putra-putr(i) [2×] gvampimmilipuru [2×] vka lu
6 English Translation
(A1–4) May there be no hindrance!
May there be prosperity for all people! May the hosts of beings be intent upon the benefit of others! May faults come to perish! May the world be blissful in every respect!
Hail! Elapsed Śaka year 850, month of Śravaṇa, fourteenth tithi of the waxing fortnight, Vurukuṅ, Kalivon, Saturday, the lunar mansion Hastā, the deity Viṣṇu, the conjunction Saubhāgya.
(A4–9) That was when the decree of the Great King, Lord of Paṅkaja, (called) dyah Vava, Śrī Vijayalokanāma-Uttuṅga, was received by the mapatih Lord of Hino, (called) pu Siṇḍok, Śrī Īśānavikrama, [and] descended to both of the resident (momah-umah) officials—the [one of] Maḍaṇḍər (called) pu Padma‚ the [one of] Aṅgəhan (called) pu Kuṇḍala—ordering with regard to the village of Saṅguran, district of Vaharu, [whose] corvée (gavai) [is] 2 māṣa [and whose] tapak mas income (paṅguhan) [is] 6 suvarṇa,
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that it be made a sīma38 [and] demarcated by the reverend of Manañjuṅ called Master Ḍa..licikhya with si Dahil, [si] Śyaṅgudī,39 [si] Səpət, ḍa pu Jambaṅ, [ḍa pu] Kəsək, ḍa pu Bhairava, [ḍa pu] Basya‚ [ḍa pu] Lukiṅ‚ [ḍa pu] Bhaṇḍa‚ [ḍa pu] Tamblaṅ, [ḍa pu] Haḍaṅ‚ [ḍa pu] Cigər‚ ḍa pu Ruyut, [ḍa pu] Vilaṅ, [ḍa pu] Kañju, [ḍa pu] Durdig, [ḍa pu] Suji, [ḍa pu] Sugas;40
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that it be donated to the Deity of the devotional temple (prāsāda kabhaktyan) in the smithy sīma at Manañjuṅ;
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that it serve as sīma domain of the Deity for maintenance of anything that is in disrepair in the holy foundation;41
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that it be the resource for the daily śivacaru and nivedya (offerings)42 for the Deity.
(A9–17) Such was the intention of His Majesty the Great King and the mapatih Lord with regard to the village of Saṅguran when it was donated to the Deity of the holy devotional temple in the smithy sīma at Manañjuṅ, ceasing to be [a part of] the district Vaharu. Its status would be independent, not to be entered by the patihs, the vahutas [and] all those who previously claimed royal revenues: the various miśras,43 all types of occupational groups (vulu-vulu),44 the paṅuraṅ, the kriṅ, the paḍam, the manimpiki, the paranakan, the limus galuh, the paṅaruhan, the taji, the vatu tajam, the sukun, the halu varak, the rakadut, the pinilai, the kataṅgaran, the tapa haji, the air haji, the malandaṅ, the ləca, the ləb-ləb, the kalaṅkaṅ, the kutak, the taṅkil, the trəpan, the saluit, the master of commerce, the master of smiths, the master of the Nambi, the master of the Huñjaman, the master of gambling, the master of harlots, the pamaṇikan, the miśra hino, the vəli hapū, the vəli vaduṅ, the vəli tambaṅ, the vəli pañjut, the vəli harəṅ, the pabisar, the palamak, the pakaluṅkuṅ, the urutan, the dampulan, the təpuṅ kavuṅ, the suṅsuṅ paṅuraṅ, the pasuk alas, the payuṅan, the sipat vilut, the pāniṅ-aṅin, the pamāvaśya, the puluṅ paḍi, the səkar tahun, the panrāṅan, the panusuh, the hopan, the sambal sumbul, the royal servants, the pamrəṣi, the courtiers, and so forth—they may not enter the sīma village at Saṅguran. Only the Deity of the devotional temple in the smithy sīma at Manañjuṅ would have authority over all of its royal revenue.
(A18–20) Likewise the [payments for] ‘pain and relief’ (sukha-duḥkha), such as:
| mayaṅ tan pavvah |
areca-blossom without betelnut |
| valū rumambat iṅ natar |
gourd vines that grow in the courtyard |
| vipati |
untimely death |
| vaṅkai kābunan |
a corpse covered with dew |
| rāh kasavur iṅ dalan |
blood spattered on the road |
| vāk-capala |
rash speech |
| duhilatan |
slander |
| hidu kasirat |
spittle that is sprayed |
| hasta-capala |
rash acts with the hand |
| mamijilakan turahniṅ kikir |
producing the trace of a file |
| mamūk |
attacking in fury |
| mamuṅpaṅ |
rape |
| ludan |
repeated attack |
| tūtan |
stalking |
| ḍaṇḍa kuḍaṇḍa |
punishment and wrongful punishment |
| bhaṇḍihala |
poisons of all sorts, |
and so forth: only the Deity of the devotional temple would be the destination of its royal revenue.
(A20–23) As for those miśra who
| mañambul |
process black dyestuffs |
| mañaṅvriṅ |
process (red) cawring dye |
| maṅlākha |
process (brownish red) lākha dye |
| maṅubar |
make red dye |
| matarub |
make sheds |
| maṅapus |
twist ropes |
| manūla vuṅkuḍu |
stab mengkudu roots |
| maṅgula |
make sugar |
| maṅdyun |
make pots |
| maṁhapū |
make lime |
| mamubut |
produce turnery |
| maṅluruṅ |
make castor oil |
| magavai ruṅki, payuṅ vəlū |
make ruṅki baskets, round (?) parasols |
| mopih |
work spathe (upih) |
| akajaṅ |
make awnings |
| magavai kisi |
make basket works |
| maṅanam-anam |
weave fabric |
| manavaṅ |
catch in nets |
| manahəb, mamisaṇḍuṅ manuk |
catch or snare birds |
| makala-kalā |
trap [birds], |
all of the royal revenue from them would be divided in three. One share would go to the Deity. One share would go to the custodians of the sīma. One share would be credited to the claimants of royal revenues.
(A24–30) The numbers of those who engaged in trade while present there were limited: those not subjected to the claimants of royal revenue were three master tradesmen per trade, per sīma.45 When buying livestock (the quotas were) 20 buffaloes, 40 cows, 80 sheep, one coop of ducks. When trading with wagons, three yokes; karah workers, three pounding blocks; smiths, one set of bellows; drum [players],46 three places to perform; keepers of packhorses (matitih), one skin; carpenters, one master tradesman; cadar (cloth) makers, four cadar looms; 1 boat with 3 suṅhara that may not have tuṇḍān. If their wares were carried by shoulder-pole—such as cloth vendors, tinkers (vendors of copper utensils), kacapuri makers, transporters, preparers of awar-awar, cotton, mengkudu, iron, copper, bronze, tin, block [salt], steel (pamaja),47 salt, sesame (oil), uncooked rice, sugar, silk, safflower (seeds?)—all types of wares that were carried by shoulder-pole: altogether their shoulder-pole loads would be five bundles per master, per sīma. What was up to that limit would not be subjected to the claimants of royal revenue, wherever those [traders] might go, whatever may be their country (of origin). However, they should keep the present document. If they exceed the limit imposed on them, they will be subjected (to levies) by the claimants of all royal levies (sa-uddhāra haji) proportionally to their excess [but taxation of the excess] should not be disproportional (tan adhikāna).48
(A30–B19) At that time the venerable of Manañjuṅ offered gifts to the Great King: 1 kāṭi of silver, 1 pair of vəḍihan tapis.49 The mapatih Lord of Hino, Śrī Īśānavikrama, was offered as gifts: 1 kāṭi of silver [and] 1 pair of vəḍihan tapis. The Lord of Sirikan, pu Marendra,50 the Lord of Vka, pu Balyaṅ, [as well as] both the resident officials—the [one of] Maḍaṇḍər and the [one of] Aṅgəhan—were offered as gifts: 5 dhāraṇa of silver [and] 1 pair of vəḍihan, per person. The [official of] Tiruan, ḍa punta Taritip, the [lord of]51 Amrāti Havaṅ Vicaksaṇa,52 the [official of] Pulu Vatu (called) pu Paṇḍamuan, the [lord of] Halaran (called) pu Guṇottama, the [official of] Maṅhuri (called) pu Maṅuvil, the [official of] Vadihati (called) pu Dinakara [and] the [lord/official of] Makudur (called) pu Balavān—[they all] were offered as gifts: 1 dhāraṇa, 4 māṣa, of silver, [and] 1 pair of vəḍihan each.
The [official of] Vaharu at that time, (called) pu Variga, was offered as gifts: 1 dhāraṇa, 4 māṣa of silver, 1 pair of vəḍihan; the official’s wife: 7 dhāraṇa, 8 māṣa, [and] 1 piece of kain. The masters at Vaharu were given as gifts: 6 dhāraṇa of silver collectively.
The 2 masters for Vadihati—[the one] of Mira-Mirah (called) saṅ Halaṅ Pahuṅ [and the one] of Halaran (called) saṅ Suddhyāstha; the 2 masters of Makudur—the [one of] Vatu Valaiṅ (called) saṅ (Bhū/Ra)te, saṅ Variṅin,53 the Paṅuraṅ of Vadihati (called) saṅ ra Vuṅū, [and] the Manuṅgū (called) saṅ Hovaṅka, the Paṅuraṅ of Makudur (called) saṅ ra Kəbəl [and] the Manuṅgū (called) saṅ Kulumpaṅ54—[they all] were given as gifts: 1 māṣa of silver [and] 1 pair of vəḍihan cadar per person.
All the overseers of the secretariat (pakaraṇān):55 the overseer of kanayakān (namely) the official of Gunuṅan (called) pu Tuntun, the overseer of junior troops (called) saṅ ra Guyu, the overseer of servants (called) pu Bali; [the herald of Hino, namely] the Kaṇḍamuhi (called) saṅ Geṣṭa, the heralds of Sirikan [the] Hujuṅ Galuh [and] of Vəka [the] Viridih; [the herald] of Kanuruhan (called) saṅ Rokat;56 [the heralds] of Səbaṅ (called) saṅ Vimala, of Bavaṅ (called) saṅ Jalaṅ, of Maḍaṇḍər (called) saṅ Cakra, of Aṅgəhan (called) saṅ Tuhan; [the herald] of Tiruan [the] Sumuḍan (called) ḍa punta Saṅgama; [the herald] of Hujuṅ (called) saṅ Pavudukan—[they all] were given as gifts: 2 dhāraṇa [and] 8 māṣa of silver collectively.
The calligraphers [to the Lord] of Hino [were given as gifts]: 2 dhāraṇa [and] 8 māṣa [of silver] collectively; both of the patih juru—the Vasah (called) saṅ Kulumpaṅ [and] the Kuci (called) saṅ ra Kavil: 1 dhāraṇa [and] 4 māṣa [of silver] per person; their heralds, the Piṅsor Hyaṅ [and] the Pasəkaran: 5 māṣa of silver per person.
The one coming forward to demarcate (the land) for57 Vadihati (called) saṅ Kamala; the one coming forward to demarcate (the land) for Makudur (called) saṅ Tajam; [the ones coming forward to demarcate the land] for Susuhan (called) saṅ Astuti [and] saṅ Balā; [the one coming forward to demarcate the land] for Tapa Haji (called) saṅ Pacintān—[they all] were given as gifts: 1 dhāraṇa [and] 1 pair of vəḍihan per person.
The patih of Kanuruhan … (called) saṅ Jāta; the patih of Hujuṅ (called) saṅ Kahyunan; the patih of Vaharu (called) saṅ Nīla; the patih of Tugaran (called) saṅ Mala; the patih paməgat of Vaharu (called) saṅ Gambo; the patih paṅkur (called) saṅ Maṅka [and] saṅ Raṅga—[they all] were given as gifts: 1 dhāraṇa [and] 1 pair of vəḍihan per person.
The patih lampuran (called) saṅ Prasama [was given] as gifts: 8 māṣa of silver, 1 sheet of vəḍihan. The parujar patih (called) si Manohara [was given] as gifts: 1 dhāraṇa [and] 1 pair of vəḍihan. The parujar patih of Kanuruhan (called) si Jaluk [and] si Rambət [as well as] the parujar patih of Vaharu (called) si Bəṅal, si Tañjak [and] si Cacu [were given] as gifts: 8 māṣa of silver [and] 1 sheet of vəḍihan per person. The vahuta of Vaharu (called) si Balusyak [and] si Kəndul, the master of kalaṅ, were given as gifts: 1 dhāraṇa [and] 1 pair of vəḍihan per person. The assistants (called) si Rāji, si Bantan [and] si Ṇḍat were given [as gifts]: 1 sheet of vəḍihan per person.
The headmen of neighbouring villages who participated as witnesses of the demarcation of the sīma:
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at Tugaran, the gusti called si Lakṣita [and] the master of kalaṅ (called) si Yogya were given as gifts: 8 māṣa of silver [and] 1 pair of vəḍihan per person;
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at Kajavān: [gap in the text]; at Pavaṅkuan: si Surā; at Kəḍi-Kəḍi: si Pahaṅ; at Buṅkaliṅan: si Tiñjo; at Kapatihan: si Piṅul;58 at Ḍahu: si Tambas—[they all] were given as gifts: 4 māṣa of silver each;
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the patih of Vuṅa-Vuṅa: 4 māṣa of silver;
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at Papanahan, the vinəkas (called) si Mañjavat; at Kajar, the temple manager (called) si Kaṇḍi; at Tampur, (the one called) si Təṅəran—[they all] were given as gifts: 4 māṣa of silver each.
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[The persons called] si Mañā, si Kəsək, si Vudalū, si Kudi were those who matətəṅən, [along with] si Luluk—[they all] were given as gifts: 4 māṣa of silver [and] 1 sheet of vəḍihan each.59
The jesters (called) si Lulut‚ si Səpat, si Hirəṅ—[they] were given 1 sheet of vəḍihan each.
The puppeteer si Rahina [was given] 4 māṣa of silver [and] 1 pair of vəḍihan. [The other ones, called] saṅ Boddhi and saṅ Mārga were given 1 pair of vəḍihan each.
(B19–22) After the giving of gifts and vəḍihan to all of them, the offerings for the Makudur were placed below the canopy. The one serving as priest poured water to purify the susuk (tenon?) and the kulumpaṅ (mortise?). The Makudur arose to offer salutation to the holy ‘heart’ and sat down below the canopy, having his feet as support (that is, he knelt), facing the holy ‘heart’, wearing as siṅhəl 1 pair of vəḍihan. The Vadihati followed. The Makudur began to make invocations (uyut) [and] cleaved the neck of the chicken, using the kulumpaṅ as underlay, and bashed an egg on the sīma stone, cursing and making an imprecation on all those whom he traditionally cursed so that the holy sīma stone would be respected. These were his words:
(B22–28) ‘Pay heed you gods at Baprakeśvara,
Great Seer Agasti,East, South, West, North, Centre, Zenith, NadirSun, Moon, Earth, Water, Wind, Fire, Sacrificer (yajamāna), EtherDharma, Day and Night, Twilight, HeartYakṣas, Rākṣasas, Piśācas, Pretas, Asuras, Garuḍa, GandharvasFour Lokapālas: Yama, Varuṇa, Kubera, Vāsava (that is, Indra)And sons of the gods: the Five Kuśikas, Nandīśvara, Mahākāla, the Six Vināyakas, Snake-Kings, Goddess Durgā,The Quadrangular ones (that is, the Aśvins?), Endless (ananta),60 SurendraEndless gods Kāla and Mr̥tyu: Gaṇas and BhūtasYou who are known to have protected (prasiddha maṅrakṣa)61 the palaces of the Great Kings (of the past) at Məḍaṅ [and] in the land of Matarām!You who take part in embodying, entering in all bodies!You all who as witnesses watch far and near, by day and by night, while you listen to the pledge, the sworn oath (śapatha sumpah), the admonition of us to all you gods!
(B28–34) If the bad person does not hold firm, does not keep this oath being submitted by the vahuta of the holy kudur (stone), whether [the bad person is] lord or servant, old or young, man or woman, mendicant or householder, as well as patih, vahuta and headmen—whoever disturbs the village of Saṅguran as a sīma offered by the venerable of Manañjuṅ to the Deity of the holy devotional temple of the smithy sīma, up to the future’s future, may he split asunder! All the more so if he shall uproot the holy sīma stone.
Therefore, let him suffer the consequences!62 You, o gods, should just kill him! Your approach when you kill him should be without looking back, not looking to the side, clash with the opponent, slap his left side, [attack anew his right side,] cut down his snout, split his skull, rip open his belly, stretch out his intestines, draw out his entrails, tear out his liver, eat his flesh, drink his blood, without delay finish off [and] bring to an end his life. If he goes to the forest, may he be eaten up by the tiger, bitten by the snake, whirled round and round by divine wrath! If he goes to the field, may he be caught by thunderclap, may his head be torn off by demons, may he be eaten by the Pamuṅvan giants!
(B34–39) Please you gods Kuśika, Garga, Metrī, Kuruṣya and Pātañjala, guardian of the North, guardian of the South, guardian of the West, guardian of the East, throw [him] in the air, tear [him] asunder (?) among all gods, throw [him] into the great ocean, drown [him] in the dam! May he be caught by the deities in the water! May he be pulled by sea monsters! May he be snatched by the crocodile! May it be there that he dies, the lawless man who dissolves the sīma village at Saṅguran. May he suffer misfortune among all ancestors (devatā)! May he go to ruins, may he be engulfed in the Ḍira! May he reach the hells! May he be dropped in the Great Raurava! May he be cooked by the forces of Yama! May he be hammered no less than seven times by the Kiṅkaras (servants of Yama)! When he is given shape, it will only be a bad one. He will suffer as long as he lives! May all types of pain be experienced by him! May all sorts of suffering be undergone by him! Every detestable thing among born creatures is what he will become! May he rot without finding rest! May he be left behind [as] fanned ash! Thus will become the lawless man who dissolves the sīma at Saṅguran!’
(B39–c12) After the Makudur had made invocations, they all changed clothes. They all sat in the təkan pasǝk,63 following the order of those who are present in the capacity64 of patih, vahuta, kabayān headmen, as well as all headmen of neighbouring villages. Old, young, man, woman, inferior, intermediate, and superior: no one was left behind in taking part in the feasting (manaḍah) at the assembly place.
They were regaled,65 being offered dressed-up cooked rice, being served ladles of (hinirusan) cooked foods (kǝla-kǝla): snacks (ambil-ambil), kasyan, lit-lit, təlu saraṇak, roasted food (saṅa-saṅān), banana core (haryas), mince (rumba-rumbah), boiled vegetables (kuluban), tetis, tumpuk-tumpuk, unsalted dried meat (ḍeṅ hañaṅ), salted dried meat (ḍeṅ hasin), sea bass (kakap), biluṅluṅ (a type of fish), butterfish (kaḍivas), shrimps (huraṅ), kavan (a type of fish), laya-layar (sailfish?), hala-hala, fried (? inariṅ) eggs, suṇṭa, beans, curd. The total of [types of] vegetables (gaṅan) per (banana) leaf was 8, excluding the various small game (kənas) [and] fish. They all feasted to their hearts’ content, drinking siddhu, ciñca, kilaṅ, tuak, three times each, being presented (vinuvuhan) side dishes (tambul) served on a tray (añjap) [such as] coconut mixture (kuravu), dates (? kurima), tamarind (asam) [and] dodol. Side by side, they took drinks (malarih), while unguents, flowers [and] rujak were put forward.66 The tuvuṅ player played.
All the foremost patih rose to pay homage, facing straight in the direction of the Great King and of the mapatih Lord. After they paid homage, they danced [accompanied by] the rāvaṇahasta. After the ones who had been asked to dance were finished (saṅkap), they sat down again. They were presented with side dishes and given drinks two times each. The baṅlus (fish) was put forward while [they] were given drinks again. They all finished and returned to their homes.
Afterwards, the headmen of Saṅguran and the venerable of Manañjuṅ, as well as those who took care of the demarcation of the sīma in their turn were allowed to feast. The jesters si Lulut‚ si Səpat, [and] si Hirəṅ all showed their skill. In the night, they hired the puppeteer called Rahina.67
(c12–15) Such were the proceedings of the demarcation of the sīma at Saṅguran. Complete. Written by the calligrapher [to the Lord] of Hino (called) saṅ Lakṣaṇa.
7 Historical Implications
7.1 The Charter’s Date of Issue
The inscription’s date has proven particularly challenging for scholars. It was only a century and a half after its discovery that the charter was placed in its correct chronological position. Raffles had initially published the year as 506 (implied Śaka era) on the basis of the faulty transliteration provided to him. Von Humboldt correctly judged this to be a misreading because it was implausibly early, but he was unable to correct it without access to the stone or alternative reproductions (Von Humboldt 1836–1839, I:217). Brandes read the year as 846 from the photographs made for Cohen Stuart, though the reading was printed in italics to indicate his uncertainty (Brandes 1887:361; 1913:43). Finally, Damais (1951:28–9) established the correct reading of the numeral figures for the Śaka year as 850 and offered the conversion of the precise date to 2 August 928. This is now universally accepted as the date of issue of the charter.
If we attempt to reproduce Damais’s result with the online application HIC,68 setting the Śaka year to 850, and applying the lunar parameters of month (Śravaṇa), fortnight (waxing), and tithi (14), we find a disparity in the resulting diagram for the cyclical weekdays (ṣaḍvāra, pañcavāra, saptavāra), which should be WU KA ŚA but are calculated instead as PA UM Ā. If, however, we set the value of the tithi to 13, we recover the match found by Damais on Saturday, 2 August 928. In the two diagrams generated with HIC (Figure 9), we see that there is a discrepancy between civil days (values indicated with #14 and #15 in the diagrams) and tithi (trayodaśī meaning ‘thirteenth’ and caturdaśī ‘fourteenth’). This kind of mismatch occurs frequently in Indic calendars, as a result of the fact that the two units are based on different cycles: the tithi, based on the relative motion of the moon and sun in the sky, is defined as exactly 1/30th of a lunar month, while the civil day, defined by earth’s rotation on its axis, is exactly 24 hours in duration (Eade and Gislén 2000:6). The Sangguran charter is one of the cases suggesting that Javanese timekeepers did not clearly distinguish between the two concepts but instead calculated the tithi by counting the number of civil days since the start of the current fortnight, rather than by direct observation of the sun and moon.69
Figure 9
HIC diagrams for 2 and 3 August, 928 CE, the former corresponding to the inscription’s date
Citation: Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde / Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia 180, 2-3 (2024) ; 10.1163/22134379-bja10060
There is a further discrepancy concerning the astronomical elements mentioned in the inscription. As shown in the second line of the two diagrams, the expected lunar mansion (nakṣatra) is Śravaṇā (no. 22) and not Hastā (no. 13). Eade and Gislén (2000:47–8) have commented on this error:
Hasta is nakṣatra 13, and one would have to be in the region of the months Kārttika—Mārgaśīrṣa, at least three months later, for Hasta / Saubhāgya to be in force. There is a further way in which the supposed configuration can be seen to be impossible. If the month is Śrawaṇa, then the 15th of that month the nakṣatra will normally be Śrawaṇa—this being how the month gets its name. If, then, we have reached the 14th of the month, the moon cannot traverse nine nakṣatras in one day. Not only this, the devatā named is ‘Viṣṇu’, the guardian of Śrawaṇa. Given the enormous importance of the nakṣatras in the business of assessing auspicious and inauspicious moments, it is hard to imagine that this text originally read ‘Hasta’.
As this inscription is not a reissue, the authors seem to have meant with their closing phrase that an error occurred between the stage of the timekeeper determining the astral parameters of the date and his result being engraved onto stone. In this connection, it may be noted that some other relatively bad errors elsewhere in the text (for instance, vijayalokanāmostuṅga for vijayalokanāmottuṅga in the king’s name) show that the production process was indeed prone to error.
7.2 The Sanskrit Stanza: An Unexpected Connection with India
As stated above (in § 3), Kern (1915) had observed the fact that the opening Sanskrit stanza of the Sangguran charter is also found in the Sugih Manek inscription issued by King Daksa thirteen years earlier, in 837 Śaka (915 CE), also in the vicinity of Malang. These kinds of benedictory stanzas are extremely common in India, both in inscriptions and in manuscripts, and several examples are found also in other inscriptions from Java that, like Sugih Manek and Sangguran, are otherwise wholly composed in Old Javanese. One of these, appended to the end of the Kancana charter, was previously published by Kern himself (1881:89). Many of them are found in multiple instances and some of them can be traced to specific works of Sanskrit literature. A Sanskrit scholar of Kern’s calibre was of course aware of these facts, but he did not raise the question whether this stanza might be found in any Indian sources, or else might be of Javanese origin.
With the ever-broadening range of digital resources at our fingertips today, increasingly representative of the depth and breadth of Sanskrit textual production, answering such questions has become much easier than it was in Kern’s time. It turns out that the stanza is indeed found, with some variation, in various Indian contexts, but it is actually very rarely found in precisely the same form as the one that we see used in East Java in the tenth century. To our knowledge, this precise form of the stanza can be traced exclusively to a single inscription of the Eastern Cālukya dynasty that ruled part of what is today northern Andhra Pradesh, on the east coast of India, from the seventh to the eleventh century. The inscription is the Pañcapāka grant of King Bhīma I, where the stanza appears in final position (no. XX):
śivam astu sarvva-jagataḥ para-hita-niratā bhavantu bhūta-gaṇāḥ |doṣāḥ prayāntu nāśaṁ sarvvatra sukhī bhavatu lokaḥ |70
Like most grants of the Eastern Cālukya dynasty, this one is not internally dated. But Bhīma I is known to have reigned from 892 to 921 CE, a period corresponding fairly closely to the dates of the Sugih Manek and Sangguran charters. In somewhat different form, the stanza also occurs in an earlier grant of the same Indian dynasty, issued by the uncle and predecessor of Bhīma I, namely Vijayāditya III Guṇaga, who ruled from 849 to 892 CE.71 A version nearly identical to the form found in Bhīma I’s grant and our Javanese charters is the final stanza (5.41) of the Southern Recension of the Sanskrit play Nāgānanda, attributed to King Harṣa (seventh century), but it is absent from other recensions (of which there are no less than four) and hence it is likely to be a later addition.72
Although it is hard to prove anything on the basis of limited and partly negative evidence, the observation that this stanza is used in this precise form only in East Java and coastal Andhra, and only in a fairly narrow window of time, between 892 and 928 CE, may well reflect a connection of Sanskrit scholarship and/or epigraphic practice between these two distant regions in that period—a connection across the Bay of Bengal that is quite unexpected on the basis of other historical sources that have thus far come to light.
7.3 The Transition from Central to East Java
According to the conventional historiography of Java, the Sangguran charter marks the transition point between the two major periods of pre-Islamic Javanese history, called the Central Javanese period (early eighth–early tenth century) and the East Javanese period (early tenth–late fifteenth century). Sangguran’s status as the last dated inscription of the Central Javanese period is presupposed in the delimitation of the epigraphical corpora published by Damais (1970:54, no. 170) and Sarkar (1971–1972:227–48, no. XCVI), and it is used as a boundary marker for the periodization of Javanese history in the official textbook Sejarah nasional Indonesia (Bambang Sumadio and Endang Sri Hardiati 2008:183–4).
This mainstream view needs to be reconsidered in the light of the empirical evidence offered by the Sangguran charter itself, as well as other records. The second half of the 920s is accorded great significance by historians, but in fact we remain very much in the dark about what actually happened in this period. The inscriptions of this period have received little scholarly attention, due to their poor state of preservation, inadequate documentation, or limited accessibility (see Appendix C for a complete list of these inscriptions). As a result, empirical data have had little impact on the scholarly debate about why the centre of Javanese politics shifted from Central to East Java in the early tenth century. The prevailing theory is that a disastrous volcanic eruption forced the relocation of the royal capital and a large part of Javanese society in the late 920s (Boechari 1979, 2012b; Bambang Sumadio and Endang Sri Hardiati 2008:183–4; Wisseman Christie 2015). However, the geological evidence for this theory is ambiguous at best, and so far, no direct evidence has emerged in support of it (Sastrawan 2022). In order to properly understand the transition from the Central Javanese to the East Javanese period, a full examination of its inscriptions is needed; the present article is a first step in this direction.
A basic question concerning the transition from Central to East Java revolves around the nomenclature and location of the royal capital. Krom argued that the palace of the Javanese kings was moved from the region of Mataram in Central Java to East Java around 928 CE. The basis of this argument lay in a particular invocation formula found in many early tenth-century Javanese sīma charters, in which deified ancestors are called upon to protect the integrity of the demarcation (Brandes 1887:360–1). Krom drew attention to a minor shift in the wording of this formula, claiming that ‘after 927 CE and before 929 CE, a momentous change takes place, because after 929 CE King Sindok appears, and he no longer gives the formula “the palace of His Majesty at Medang in the land of Mataram (kaḍatuan śrī mahārāja)”, but rather “the palace of the deified ancestors at Medang” (kaḍatuan ra hyaṅta (r)i Mĕḍang)’ (Krom 1931:196). Krom assumed that the former expression refers to a single, living king, while the latter refers to multiple, deceased kings—a claim that can be neither grammatically justified nor refuted due to the lack of number marking in Old Javanese. He concluded that ‘it is probable, though we lack certainty’ that the ‘momentous change’ around 928 CE involved a shift of the centre of royal power from Central to East Java.
Krom’s hypothetical chronology was flawed. He estimated Wawa’s regnal period as 924–927 CE (Krom 1931:196; 1938:186), based on Brandes’s incorrect reading of 846 Śaka for Sangguran and his own imprecise interpretation of 849 Śaka for the Kinawe inscription.73 Subsequent research has shown that the three dateable inscriptions of Wawa were all issued in 928 CE. However, even once the correction has been made to Wawa’s regnal years (maximum range: late 927–early 929), there are still problems with Krom’s chronology. The shift of wording in the invocation formula from ‘palace(s) of the king(s)’ to ‘palace(s) of the ancestor(s)’ does not actually occur around 928 CE but almost a decade later. The earliest source to use ‘ancestor(s)’ (ra hyaṅta) in this context is the Anjuk Ladang inscription, issued by Sindok on 10 April 937. The ‘momentous change’ supposedly signified by this shift of wording should therefore have occurred eight years into Sindok’s reign. But the final lines of the Turyan inscription (929 CE) show that Sindok’s palace was already located in East Java during the first year of his reign.74 Inscriptions that Krom could not or did not take into account also show that he was wrong to claim that Sindok stopped using the old wording ‘palace(s) of the king(s)’ in the invocation, as these words continue to be used in Turyan, Linggasuntan (929 CE), Paradah I (934 CE), and Alasantan (939 CE). A sounder approach is to treat all the variant wordings of the invocation (listed in Appendix D) as essentially identical in meaning, and not to read any ‘momentous change’ into small differences in word choice.
7.4 The Meaning of Medang
These problems in Krom’s chronology reveal that the invocation’s wording actually tells us very little about the timing of the shift of government from Central to East Java, which was duly noted by Boechari (1979:475–6; 2012b:159). Similarly, the invocation formula cannot serve as reliable evidence for the location of the palace at the time each inscription was issued, because it refers to kings of the indeterminate past rather than to the current reigning king. The Sangguran charter is significant in this respect, because it is the earliest inscription to incorporate the toponym Medang alongside the pre-existing ‘land (bhūmi) of Mataram’ in the context of this invocation formula.75 In some Sindok inscriptions after 937 CE, the additional toponym Watu Galuh also appears.
These toponyms in the invocation formula have generated much speculation. Brandes interpreted the collocation of Medang and Mataram to mean that Medang was ‘the name of the [royal] residence’ of the ‘kingdom of Mataram’ (Brandes 1887:361). Krom (1938:187–8) recognized Medang as being located in Central Java, implying that the references to Medang in East Javanese inscriptions were all retrospective. De Casparis, following Brandes’s interpretation of Medang as a palace name, imagined that there were multiple palaces called Medang at different times and in different places. Drawing from the Siwagerha and Mantyasih I inscriptions, and from charters issued by Sindok, he distinguished ‘Mĕḍang i bhūmi Mataram, Mĕḍang ri Pohpitu […] and Mĕḍang in Mamratipura’ as three separate locations (De Casparis 1956:300).76 Following his lead, Boechari frequently talked of Medang as the name of the palace that moved from Central to East Java (for example, Boechari 1979:476–7; 2012b:159–60). Since then, Indonesian historians have widely accepted the notion that ‘the location of the capital Medang did in fact move around’ (Bambang Sumadio and Endang Sri Hardiati 2008:121).77
Despite its popularity, the theory of multiple palaces all called Medang is weak. There is no evidence that Medang refers to the name of the royal palace, as Brandes first supposed. There are examples of explicit designations in Javanese epigraphy for temples and foundations using the term maṅaran (‘named’),78 but there are no known examples of palaces being named in the same way. In Javanese inscriptions of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, palaces are exclusively referred to by their locations.79 By systematically comparing all known instances of the invocation formula (see Appendix D), it becomes clear that Medang should be interpreted as a toponym rather than the name of a palace. In this interpretation, the conjunction ‘and’ is elided between the toponyms, as is common in Old Javanese.80 Thus the Sangguran version of the invocation calls upon the deities ‘who are known to have protected the palaces of the Great Kings (of the past) at Məḍaṅ [and] in the land of Matarām’, with some inscriptions issued by Sindok after 937 adding ‘at Vatu Galuh’ to the end of the formula.81 The word kaḍatvan should be taken in the plural, referring to the various palaces of past kings, one of which (perhaps the earliest) was located at Medang. This interpretation is strengthened by the Balinese examples (the last three items listed in Appendix D), which explicitly refer to the existence of multiple palace sites: ‘all of the royal palaces’ (sakvaihniṅ rājadhānī). Attempts to translate the word kaḍatvan in the singular with multiple specifications, such as ‘the palace of the deified [kings] of Məḍaṅ in the kingdom of Matarām situated at Watugaluh’ (Boechari 1979:477; 2012b:159), are unconvincing. Medang is therefore best understood as the name of a single place in Central Java, one of several locations where the royal palace had once been located, but which had become a distant memory by the 920s.
7.5 Continuities between Wawa and Sindok
Through a closer examination of the empirical data offered by the Sangguran charter, we can also gain clarity on the nature of the transition between the Central and East Javanese periods. The gap between the reigns of Wawa and Sindok is conventionally understood as a major rupture in Javanese history. However, the epigraphical record instead shows an almost seamless transition of administration between these two reigns. As noted by Antoinette Barrett Jones (1984:95), both kings were served by the same group of high officials, with nearly identical names occupying the major offices of the royal court (see the table in Appendix E). The most significant difference is simply the replacement of Wawa by Sindok as king from the Gulung-gulung inscription onwards; otherwise, the kingdom’s top leaders remain almost exactly the same.
Sindok was the highest official during Wawa’s reign. He held the office of rakryān i Hino, in combination with the function mapatih, which indicates a position like that of a chief minister. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, this position also seems to have marked out the designated successor of an incumbent king (Boechari 1967–1968, 2012a). During the reign of Balitung (898–910), the chief minister office was held by Daksa, who subsequently took the throne (910–after 915). The succession of Sindok therefore seems to have been preordained, and the leadership group remained stable during the royal transition. These facts are hard to reconcile with the hypothesis of a major dislocation in the Javanese state in 928, let alone a panicked shifting of capital to East Java due to a natural disaster. Instead, the picture seems to be one of an orderly transfer of power from Wawa to Sindok.82
The Sangguran charter offers three further pieces of evidence for the continuity between Wawa’s and Sindok’s administrations. First, the engraving of the stone itself was done by a certain ‘calligrapher of Hino (called) Lakṣana’ (c15), whose link to Hino suggests that he was directly associated with Sindok. This association is confirmed by Lakṣana’s continued appearance during Sindok’s reign as both a ‘calligrapher of Hino’ (Paradah I, 2B29) and a ‘calligrapher of the king’ (Alasantan, 2v15).83 The same process of promotion can be seen in the change of the title of the official of Tuntun, from being ‘overseer of the kanayakān of Hino’ (Sangguran) to ‘overseer of the kanayakān of the king’ (Masahar B8–9). Second, many of the formulaic phrases used in Sangguran show very similar wording to Sindok’s early inscriptions; these parallel passages have helped us to improve on Brandes’s readings in several parts of the text. (One particularly extensive formula is selected for more detailed analysis in the next section.) Third, the large majority of Wawa’s inscriptions were issued in East Java, with Wulakan being the only clear exception of a Central Javanese inscription (Appendix C). This territorial distribution overlaps with the much-larger corpus of Sindok, showing that they operated in largely the same regions of present-day Malang, Mojokerto, and Nganjuk.
All of these considerations suggest that the centre of Javanese royal power had, in fact, already moved to East Java when Wawa reigned (cf. Boechari 1979:476–7; 2012b:160). The clear continuities of administration and territory between Wawa’s and Sindok’s reigns suggest that the major break in Javanese history should not be placed after the Sangguran charter of 928 but, instead, before the reign of Wawa. This would entail a reimagining of the transition between the Central and East Javanese periods, with Wawa serving not as the final chapter of the Mataram kingdom but, rather, as the first of a long succession of pre-Islamic rulers of East Java, culminating in the Majapahit state.
7.6 Towards a Holistic History of Java
Historiography on early Java has so far predominantly focused on the kinds of political and administrative history addressed in the preceding paragraphs. But scholarship in this field, we believe, must now start to capitalize on the large and largely untapped potential for a more holistic consideration of the data relating to the history of culture, as well as language, that emerge from studying even relatively well-known inscriptions afresh. This potential has so far been explored most significantly in the work of the late Jan Wisseman Christie (see Christie and Miksic 2021), who tended to focus on economic history, while the perspective of language history has recently come into focus in an article that two of us have co-authored (Titi Surti Nastiti, Eko Bastiawan and Griffiths 2022). In this section, we concentrate on the description of the sīma foundation ceremony, emphasizing the angle of food history, to illustrate some of the wealth to be found in these kinds of records.
Scholarly understanding of the ritual aspects of sīma foundations, a persistent though evolving feature of the epigraphic archive over the centuries, is still quite limited. What little research has been done has tended to focus on Central Javanese epigraphic material. Useful preliminary overviews have been furnished by Timbul Haryono in two articles (1980, 1999). This scholar rightly pointed out that the rundown of the ceremony varies among epigraphic sources; he furnished an overview of all the elements (Timbul Haryono 1980:41–2) that may occur in descriptions of a sīma foundation ceremony (though they do not always figure in this order):84
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Bestowal of tribute by beneficiaries to representatives of the state and neighbouring communities attending the ceremony.
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Preparing the requisites for the ceremony.
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A feast with food and drink consumed collectively by those in attendance.
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Ritual procedures involving flowers.
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The attendees taking their places around the stones called vatu sīma and vatu kulumpaṅ in specific arrangement reflecting social status.
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Procedure of sacrificing a chicken and smashing eggs on the stones.
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Worship of the stones and of (banana?) leaves from which a meal is consumed.
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Performances by dancers, puppeteers, and jesters.
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Curses on those who violate the prerogatives of the sīma.
In what follows, we will zoom in on item 3 (description of the feast), which is found near the end of the Sangguran charter, starting at line B39. While Timbul Haryono focused on inscriptions from early tenth-century Central Java, he also took into account the Sangguran charter and a small number of inscriptions from the reign of Sindok based on the editions available at his time (all contained in Brandes 1913), namely the charters of Sarangan, Anjuk Ladang, and Paradah II. Since then, thanks to newly discovered inscriptions (Wibowo 1979), the improved publication of inscriptions first deciphered by Brandes (Trigangga 2003; Hasan Djafar and Trigangga 2019), and our own efforts to decipher inscriptions in the field and museums, a considerably more extensive set of inscriptions issued by Sindok has now become available for comparison with the description of the feast in Sangguran. In Appendix F, we list all the items from the Sindok corpus, as it is available for study today, which contains text passages comparable to the one in Sangguran.
A comparison of these items reveals that, from the Sangguran charter onwards, the feast description is introduced with the phrase i tlas saṅ makudur maṅuyut masalin sira kabaih kapva maluṅguh iṅ tkan pasək in most of the inscriptions that contain this item at all. The Sangguran charter is the earliest example of a specific template for the description of this feast, of which further instances are found throughout Sindok’s reign. This is a particularly extensive illustration of the phraseological continuities between the Sangguran charter and the inscriptions of Sindok, as alluded to in the previous section. The existence of such a template is an aspect of chancery practices that itself invites scholarly reflection, though it is not our focus here.
To highlight the close resemblance between the Sangguran feast description and that found in other inscriptions, we present here our reading of the recently discovered Masahar charter, on which there has not yet been an authoritative publication. Although the stela on which this charter is engraved is not intact, the preserved parts offer an unusually pristine specimen of Sindok-period epigraphy on stone (Figure 10). The Masahar charter, chronologically close to Sangguran, presents the shortest version of this passage among the Sindok items listed in Appendix F, and it reserves an entire lateral face for it, a phenomenon also observed in Linggasuntan. The Masahar example has the important advantage of using abundant punctuation that helps to understand how the text was intended to be segmented, whereas in the Sangguran charter’s description of the feast we find more sparing use of punctuation. We mark with an asterisk in the translation important terms associated with food and drink, which are discussed individually in the word list below.
Segment 1
(1) I tlas saṁ makudur· maṅuyut· ma(2)salin· sira kabaiḥ kapva maluṁgu[ḥ] (3) Iṁ tkan· pasak·, tumūt krama saṁ ha(4)na riṁ kon· patiḥ vahuta rāma ka(5)bayan·, muAṁ rāma tpi ⟨si⟩riṁ matuha ma(6)nuAm·, laki-laki vadvan· tan ha(7)na kāntun· Ilu manaḍaḥ riṁ paglaran·
Figure 10
Masahar, lateral face left
Citation: Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde / Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia 180, 2-3 (2024) ; 10.1163/22134379-bja10060
Photo by Adeline LevivierAfter the Makudur had made invocations, they all changed clothes. They all sat in the təkan pasək, following the order of those who were present in the capacity of patih, vahuta, kabayān headmen, as well as headmen of neighbouring villages. Old, young, man, woman: no one was left behind in taking part in the feasting at the assembly place.
Segment 2
(8) kiran·-kuran· InaṁsəAn· sku(9)l· dāndānan·, hinirusan kla-kla (10) Ambill-ambil·, kasyan·, lit·-li(11)t·, tlu sānak·, saṅa-saṅān·, ru(12)mbarumbaḥ kuluban·, tetis·, tu(13)mpuk-tumpuk·, ḍeṁ hañaṁ, ḍeṁ ha(14)sin·, kakap·, huraṁ, biluṁluṁ, ka(15)van·, rumahan·, hala-hala, hanti(16)ga Inariṁ, suṇṭa, Atak·, pəhan· (17) tahulan· ginaṅanan·, haryyas· (18) piṇḍa gaṅan· Iṁ saron· 10 len· (19) saṅkā riṁ Ivak·, knas· prakāra, A(20)naḍaḥ sira kabaiḥ yuthāsukha,85 ma(21)ṅinum· siddhu, ciñca, tuAk·, piṁti(22)ga sovaṁ, vinuvuhan· tambul· I(23)nañjapan·, kuravu, kurima, Asa(24)m·, dvadval·, kapva madulur malariḥ (25) Umaṁ⊔sə: taṁ jnu skar·, Ana⊔bəḥ ta (26) saṁ matuvuṁ,
They were regaled (kurən*), being offered dressed-up cooked rice (səkul dandanan*), being served ladles (hirus*) of cooked foods, snacks, kasyan, lit-lit, təlu sānak*, roasted food, mince (rumba-rumbah), boiled vegetables (kuluban), tetis, tumpuk-tumpuk, unsalted dried meat, salted dried meat, sea bass, shrimps, biluṅluṅ, kavan, rumahan, hala-hala, fried (? ariṅ*) eggs, suṇṭa*, beans, curd, (fish?) bones (tahulan) cooked/eaten with vegetables (g-in-aṅan-an), [and] banana core (haryas). The total of (types of) vegetables per (banana) leaf was 10, apart from the various fish [and] small game. They all feasted to their hearts’ content, drinking sīdhu, ciñca, [and] tuak three times each, and were presented (vuvuh*) side dishes served on a tray (añjap*) [such as] coconut mixture (kuravu*), dates (kurima*), tamarind [and] dodol. Side by side, they took drinks (larih*), while offering unguents [and] flowers (? jənu səkar). The tuvuṅ player played.
Segment 3
maṁḍi⊔ri ta sira ka(27)baiḥ patiḥ pramukha, kapva manam[baḥ] (28) [huma]rap· sakahanān· [śr]ī [mahā](29)[rāja //] (Ø) //
They all stood up, starting with the patih. They all paid their respects facing wherever the Great King found himself.
We zoom in further on segment 2, with its food- and beverage-related vocabulary, including the names of dishes and the terminology that appears to refer to how they were prepared, served, or consumed. This vocabulary is still poorly understood and, in some cases, remains unrecorded in the Old Javanese-English dictionary (OJED; Zoetmulder 1982). Several previous studies exist of the description of feasts in Old Javanese inscriptions (Barrett-Jones 1984:34–6 and 47–8, ‘List 5: Food and Drink Consumed at Feasts’; Matsuyama 2009:121–41). One of the important sources used by these scholars is the Watu Kura I charter, a text that was engraved in 1270 Śaka and ostensibly reproduces an original dated to 824 Śaka (during the reign of Balitung). In reality it contains several elements that rather appear to be based on Sindok-period textual material, though representing it in a way that turns out to be quite garbled if compared to the primary sources dating directly from the reign of Sindok that we are now able to use. These additional and more reliable textual sources unavailable to previous scholars allow us to make some new observations.
The Masahar charter has a slightly longer list of items mentioned before the phrase piṇḍa gaṅan iṅ saron that it shares with Sangguran. In Masahar, between pə̄han (perhaps a kind of curd) and haryas (banana core), we find the words tahulan ginaṅanan. Exactly the same sequence of items is found in the still unpublished Paradah I charter, as well as in the charter Paradah II, of which a provisional decipherment was published long ago (Brandes 1913). The concurrence of these three Sindok-period inscriptions is sufficient to lay to rest the idea that a parallel passage in the description of the feast in Watu Kura I can be interpreted as transmitting the words tahu lan (which would mean ‘tofu and’) and thereby become early evidence of consumption of soybean products in early Java. The issue of interpretation of the Watu Kura I passage was summarized recently by Shurtleff and Aoyagi (2021:97–8), who were not yet aware of the existence of new and more authentic epigraphic evidence. The interpretation with the conjunction lan is to be rejected for the simple reason that this word is never used in early forms of Old Javanese. Rather, we seem to have here the word tahulan that means ‘bone’ or ‘fish-bone’, though it is still unclear whether ginaṅanan implies a preparation or a consumption with ‘vegetables’ (gaṅan).
This ginaṅanan is only one of several Old Javanese verb forms that occur throughout the description to describe actions applied to the food items, but whose meanings cannot in every case be determined with confidence as they do not occur, or occur only rarely, in other sources. Taking into account both these rare verb forms and the nouns designating food items, we propose the following addenda and corrigenda to the presentation of the Old Javanese (OJ) lexicon in OJED. All references to Modern Javanese (MJ) lexicon can be traced in the magnificent online aggregation of dictionaries offered by ‘Sastra Jawa’.86
añjap, inañjapan—In the phrase vinuvuhan tambul inañjapan kuravu kurima, asam dvadval, we propose that inañjapan is the head of a dependent clause specifying tambul. The morphological structure of this passive verb form implies an active form *aṅ-añjap-i or *(u)m-añjap-i and a base añjap, none of which are recorded in OJED or known elsewhere in OJ. Some dictionaries of MJ include a word anjap meaning ‘shelf, rack’. An apparently related word is preserved in Karo Batak, where it means ‘meja tempat memberi sajian kepada roh’ (Siregar et al. 2001:8); the word anjap was in fact already recorded in Van der Tuuk’s dictionary (1861:9b), where it is listed as a synonym of raga-raga, without further explanation, while the same dictionary (431b) explains raga-raga as a ‘small square rack of split bamboo’ used in ritual contexts. This raga-raga is illustrated, and its ritual use explained, by Tobing (1963:78–81, sketch 1). We propose that the ancient Javanese añjap may have had a similar form and function.87ariṅ, inariṅ—In the expression hantiga inariṅ, the verb form in-ariṅ must imply some manner of reduction of eggs to a solid state, perhaps by boiling or frying, but it is impossible to be sure which, because the meaning of the base ariṅ is not firmly established. OJED distinguishes (a) ‘ariṅ I resting, quiet, reposed, at ease, feeling comfortable, feeling at home, feeling secure, carefree, without fear; (u)mariṅ at ease, without fear, quiet; aṅariṅ, aṅariṅ-ariṅ to rest, repose, relax, sport’, on the one hand, and (b) ‘ariṅ II inariṅ, inariṅ-ariṅ (pf) to bake’, on the other. In the two textual passages cited to support the second meaning, the context is that of dried seafood or fish, as in Rāmāyaṇa 15.26 kadi tenariṅ huraṅ akiṅ ya riṅ karaṅ.88hirus, hinirusan—In OJED, under irus, the subentry irusan is in need of correction, as it is based on a single passage from the problematic Watu Kura I inscription, which we have already mentioned above. The subentry irusan needs to be replaced by one for the verbal derivation aṅ-hirus-i, of which hinirusan is the passive form. Although the word is hardly attested in Old Javanese, the meaning is relatively certain because irus, meaning ‘ladle’, is preserved in MJ.kuravu—OJED records only kuravuṅ, but the final nasal is based on only one occurrence, in Rāmāyaṇa 26.25 mapa kālah-alah apa tāmbəha tambul asiṅ kakuraṅ kuravuṅ kurapas kurahan,89 where it could be interpreted as enclitic definite marker -ṅ, while none of the inscriptions ever shows a clear anusvāra. Hence, we propose to adopt kuravu as lemma instead of kuravuṅ. This kuravu must be the same as MJ krawu and Malay kerabu—terms denoting preparations consisting of mixed condiments whose precise ingredients differ regionally, though in Java they often include grated coconut.90kurən, kinurən-kurən—OJED only recorded the active form makurən-kurən, glossed ‘to receive with food (etc), regale’. The passive form is new. No change to the gloss is needed.kurima—Unrecorded in OJED, this term might be connected with kurma in MJ and Malay. In Malay, kurma can mean ‘date’ (the fruit), a loanword from Persian ḵẖurmā, and it can also designate a meat stew from Persian qorma. The second meaning can be excluded in the present context. In a MJ list of synonyms, kurima figures as a synonym of mango. This may mean that the word at one point denoted a specific variety of said fruit. If we assume an old borrowing from the Persian word for ‘date’ (noting that the text also contains another Persian borrowing, namely cadar), we can imagine a possible semantic shift to ‘mango’ (cf. mangga apulkat and mangga apel in more recent times) while this kurima’s place was then taken by kurma to mean ‘date’. What remains puzzling is the interconsonantal /i/, as the segment /rm/ is unproblematic in Javanese phonology. Maybe one should consider the word to have been borrowed from some South Asian vernacular.91larih, malarih—It seems unlikely that malarih means ‘server’ (as per OJED, s.v. alarih) in the description of the feast, and more likely that it means ‘to take drinks’ (OJED, s.v. larih ‘drinks, refreshment’).rujak—This noun, still very familiar in present-day Indonesia, that designates a variety of dishes with chopped-up fruit, is not recorded in OJED as such but only in verbal derivations and in the reduplicated form rurujak. It does not occur in all versions of the description of the feast (it is absent, for instance, from the Masahar passage that we have focused on), but it does appear in Sangguran, Linggasuntan (c30), Paradah I (2B25), and Paradah II (B45).səkul dandanan—This expression, apparently meaning ‘dressed-up cooked rice’, occurs in all descriptions that follow the Sangguran template. It seems to be equivalent to what is called skul paripūrṇa ‘complete rice’ in two descriptions that follow another template (Gulung-gulung and Jeru-jeru). One is tempted to imagine something like the modern nasi tumpeng.suṇṭa, suṇḍa (?), suḍa—The sequence hantiga Inariṁ, suṇṭa has never been properly understood by previous scholars, and figures in some more or less confusingly misread forms in existing editions (for example, inarisuṇḍa). The reading is clearly suṇṭa in Sangguran and Masahar, and even though all of the editions of parallel texts read suṇḍa in this context, we think reading suṇṭa is possible in Alasantan and we expect that reverification of Linggasuntan and Paradah II would lead to the same result, as the difference between subscript ḍ and ṭ is easily missed if one does not pay close attention. We proceed on the assumption that suṇṭa is the intended reading everywhere. This word is not found in any other context, as far as we know, and is unrecorded in OJED. We are inclined to see a connection with the almost equally rare word suḍa (glossed in OJED as ‘a kind of plant with edible roots?’). This occurs, for example, in the Svayambhu, an Old Javanese paraphrase of the classic Sanskrit law treatise Mānavadharmaśāstra, where vvaṅ manuhan suḍa uvi hilus ‘people who dig up suḍa, yams, or hilus’ is the gloss offered for mūlakhānakān ‘root-diggers’ in the Sanskrit text.92 The same association of suḍa with uvi ‘yams’ is found in both of the two kakavin passages cited in OJED. We are tempted to speculate that there is a connection with suṇṭi, which is a loanword from Sanskrit śuṇṭhī ‘dry ginger’. One way to explain the coexistence of suṇṭa (perhaps suṇḍa), suḍa and suṇṭi, would be to assume that these all reflect different moments of borrowing from a family of Indic words that saw a lot change over the centuries in India itself. We are unable to reach a more definitive interpretation for the time being, other than to point to several potentially relevant entries in the Comparative dictionary of Indo-Aryan languages (Turner 1966), namely nos 12513 *śuḍa ‘defective’, śuṇṭhá-¹ ‘epithet of cow or bull’, 12514 *śuṇṭha² ‘lump’, and 12515 śuṇṭhī ‘dry ginger’.təlu saranak/saraṇak/sānak—The OJED entry ranak II is in need of correction, as it is based on only two epigraphic passages for which Zoetmulder could not use reliable editions. Multiple inscriptions of this period read tlu saranak/saraṇak/sānak. Since the meaning of the second word is not transparent, while its very form is not consistent from inscription to inscription (for example, saranak in Sangguran, but sānak in the Masahar passage cited above), the meaning of the expression as a whole is not clear, but it seems to be literally ‘three per ranak’. Alternatively, we may hazard a connection with the word ‘egg’ (standard Old Javanese hantiga but also hantəlū, Malay telur), in which case the sense would be something like ‘eggs of the same child’.vuvuh, vinuvuhan—The OJED entry offers only glosses based on the words ‘increase, growth’, but epigraphic data require admitting a meaning ‘to present so. sth.’. In the descriptions of the feast, the passive form vinuvuhan is paired with tambul to give the meaning ‘they were presented side dishes’. Comparison with Malay bubuh ‘to place (before someone)’ strengthens this theory. Early examples from De Houtman’s 1603 Malay–Dutch lexicon Spraeck ende woord-boek support our hypothesis as to Old Javanese usage of vuvuh in connection with food: for example, bobo mackan adapan Nachgoda ‘place the food before the Captain’, bobo garam doeuloe ‘put the salt out first’ (Lombard 1970:29, 100; see also p. 182).
Thus, the analysis of the lexical material found in this passage of the Sangguran charter has revealed a variety of facts relating to the menu of food items that were served at an early Javanese ritual feast and the manner in which items were served. These new data for the history of commensal feasts in Java complement those from other kinds of sources that have been the focus of previous scholarship (for example, Jákl 2019). The analysis offered here has been made possible through comparison of several instances of the same template. These instances have become available thanks to painstaking work in re-editing a difficult epigraphic corpus, namely that of Sindok’s reign, and the ongoing discovery of new evidence. The comparative approach to this segment has been crucial to firming up the reading of certain items, such as suṇṭa. Even in a short segment like this one, it has been possible to enrich our knowledge of six terms denoting edibles (of which the description lists many more, notably many types of fish). A previously unknown piece of furniture (called añjap) used for serving food has come to the fore, as has a relatively detailed statement on how food was served on leaves. This, along with certain terms like dodol and rujak, illustrates the longevity of particular foodstuffs and manners of consumption.
8 Conclusion
The Sangguran charter has played varying roles in the eleven centuries of its existence. It was first inscribed in 928 to record a royal gift, thereby serving as a legal document to protect the privileges enjoyed by the temple at Mananjung, a place that still eludes precise localization but was situated somewhere near the present-day route between the Javanese cities of Malang and Batu. The charter was issued at a decisive moment in Javanese history, as the centre of political and economic power was shifting from the central to the eastern part of the island in the early tenth century. Several misapprehensions about this historical shift have persisted in the scholarly literature, such as the idea of multiple palaces called Medang. Our study’s reappraisal of the Sangguran charter allows us to clarify the manner in which the Javanese state came to be centred in East Java. It has also offered an occasion to illustrate some of the interesting data about ancient Javanese social and dietary life that can be obtained from the inscription. In subsequent centuries, the stone lost its political and social relevance and became one of the many antiquities strewn across the Javanese countryside, a monument to a forgotten society.
After its discovery in the early nineteenth century, the Sangguran charter gained new significance as a source of Western knowledge about the Orient and as a family heirloom. Since its arrival on the Minto Estate, the stone has never been moved again, so that it has now spent nearly a quarter of its existence outside of Indonesia. The artefact itself has remained in very good condition, perhaps better than it would have been had it always remained in Indonesia. The stone has been the subject of sporadic inquiry over the last two hundred years. Despite its good condition, research has been hampered by complications of access and the weather conditions in Scotland being generally unfavourable to high-quality photographic reproduction. This study is the first to offer a full text edition and translation that is based on direct inspection and high-resolution imaging of the stone.
In recent decades, the stone has gained another role as an Indonesian cultural heritage object. Due to the unusual circumstances of its expatriation to Scotland, it has become a topic of repatriation discourse, though it has not attracted the same level of interest as Indonesian objects held in the Netherlands. A major argument in favour of repatriation is that these objects are inaccessible to the people who attach greatest collective value to them. In this connection, we would like to stress the observation that text-bearing artefacts—whether inscriptions or manuscripts—have generally been given limited attention in discussions of repatriation, which have focused instead on other kinds of heritage. This is true especially of the repatriation in July–August 2023 of parts of a substantial collection of artefacts looted in 1894 by Dutch forces from the royal palace of Lombok (Sastrawan 2020–2021, 2023). The bulk of the text-bearing artefacts that had been looted was gifted in 1906 by the Netherlands Indies government to Leiden University Library, where they remain to this day, some foundational texts of early Indonesian literary and religious culture being among them, such as the Buddhist scripture Saṅ Hyaṅ Kamahāyānikan (codices Or. 5068, Or. 5083, and Or. 5129). But none of these were included in the 2023 repatriation.93 Among the rather numerous Javanese inscriptions held in collections outside of Indonesia, only the Pucangan and Sangguran charter have received attention in repatriation discourse.94 Their textual contents, if they are considered at all, are largely taken for granted and assumed to require no further investigation.95
This disregard for the potential of new insight into the textual contents of physical heritage objects is associated with the widespread decline in specialist knowledge required to understand texts that have come down to us from ancient Java, especially proficiency in the Old Javanese language. We believe that the required linguistic and philological expertise, displayed by past stalwarts both Indonesian and foreign, constitutes an essential body of intangible cultural heritage, which matters just as much as the artefacts themselves. We would therefore urge the Indonesian government to give greater priority to strengthening its human resources in the study of ancient written documents. One day, the Sangguran charter may return to Indonesia. If it does, we hope it is given a place among the community in Kota Batu that is attached to its value as a pusaka. But as we have sought to demonstrate here, it is only through the ability to decipher, translate, and interpret what such inscriptions say, that we can hope to truly restore them to their rightful places in history.
Acknowledgements
The present publication is a result of the project DHARMA (The Domestication of ‘Hindu’ Asceticism and the Religious Making of South and Southeast Asia). This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 809994).
Timothy Elliot-Murray-Kynynmound, the seventh Earl of Minto, graciously allowed us to spend a few days at his family home on the Scottish borders in June 2022 to examine the stone. During this visit, Adeline Levivier (EFEO/DHARMA) documented the stone, including the photogrammetric imaging that forms the main reproduction on which our new readings rely. Some of the data regarding other inscriptions used for this article were collected during fieldwork in November 2022 and March 2023 as part of the collaboration between Badan Riset dan Inovasi Nasional (BRIN, National Reseach and Innovation Agency) and the École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO, French School of Asian Studies); in particular, we thank Titi Surti Nastiti for her involvement as BRIN’s team leader.
Annabel Gallop has encouraged our work from the start. She and other British Library staff have supported it in various ways, notably by procuring images of eye copies and manuscripts held in their custody. Hadi Sidomulyo assisted with the identification of ancient toponyms and the find-spots of several inscriptions. Dániel Balogh furnished crucial Indological data used for our commentary on the Sanskrit stanza, while Tom Hoogervorst supplied equally crucial data for our lexicographic comments. Anton Zakharov offered useful suggestions on aspects of the translation. Roberta Zollo furnished interesting Batak data.
Appendix A. Correspondence between Colin Mackenzie and Lucius Rawdon Burke on the Sangguran Charter
The earliest written records of the Sangguran charter known to date are two manuscript letters currently held in the Mackenzie collections of the British Library. We present here our transcriptions of the letters that pertain to the Sangguran charter, using the same editorial conventions as those outlined above for editing the charter. The first letter from Mackenzie, which is quite difficult to read, is transcribed as best we could. The second letter from Burke is very legible and in this instance, we have somewhat normalized spelling and punctuation to improve readability.
From C. Mackenzie to L.R. Burke, 29 March 1812 (MSS Eur Mack Misc 90, p. 168)
Burke
You are to proceed to Bangel to the Tomagong’s96 who will receive you in my name on mentioning that you are sent by me to Copy of⟨f⟩ the Inscription on the large Stone lately arrived from Malang.
1 You are previously to provide yourself with a sufficiency of Paper which you should get oiled in order to be ready for taking off the Inscription on a large stone of 6 feet by 4½—Take the Characters off from both sides & from the edge & let it be done very accurately by yourself & by Newman—
2 Make Newman also take a Sketch View of the Stone standing up on its Pedestal, with some of the Nobles in their proper Dress near—
3 Let Newman take Drawings also of 8 or 9 small Stone Images there, 4 of which came from the Tomagong of Passarouang—As I shall want them all you can arrange with him about them—
4 After you are done at Bangel as soon as convenient, there is an Ancient Temple on the road there on the side of it, in a Garden. The Tomagong will send people with you to shew it—I wish Newman to take a Drawing of this Edifice in any point of view that is most expressive of it—perhaps two views may be necessary—for which purpose you may take some of the [×4] there—
5 After this are there a number of curious carvings on Stones all round it. I wish Newman to take Drawings of as many of them as possible; they consist of figures of women, neatly cut, sitting or leaning on each side of large Urns—there are several of them & I wish to have Copies.
6 After this on the road towards the hills there is an old Sculptured Stone which the Tomagong will send people to shew you to⟨o⟩—It is carved with Square Characters, but I am afraid it will be difficult to take them all off—but I trust that you & Newman will exert yourselves to have them done by the time I arrive 4 or 5 days ⟨hence.⟩
7 While you are there at Bangil mention to the Tomagong my sense of his obliging attention—& endeavour to collect what notes you can of the History of the Country—of the Calinga Rajas transactions—Of the Bramans—Of any curious customs—Of any Ancient towns—Copper Statues—Sculptures—Ancient Laws—& any Curiosities whatever—the work of the Javan & Sanscrit—Character etc. etc. Vases with Bones
Your wellwisher
C. Mackenzie
Sorabaya, March 29, 1812
From L.R. Burke to C. Mackenzie, 5 April 1811 (MSS Eur Mack Private 74, p. 329)
Bangil
To Lieutenant Colonel Mackenzie
Surveyor General &c &c &c
Sir
Agreeably to your Instructions of the 29th March last, I went in the first place to the Hospital & brought Newman along with me & on the 31st at 1am we proceeded towards Bangel where we arrived at about 2 PM. On my arrival I went to the Tomangong’s House & mentioned that I was sent by you to trace off the Inscription. He accompanied us to the shed where the Inscription was & shewed it to us. He immediately ordered all the letters, after painting the stone white, to be blackened—On the 1st we sat about the Inscription & finished nearly the 1st side, the 2d we completed that & the greatest part of the 2d side, the 3d we completed it entirely & Newman took Drawings of the Dancers & the stone, the 4th we went to the Ancient Temple at Chandee97 & after Newman had taken two Views one from the _ & the other from the _ of it we proceeded on to Kirandan where we got the Inscription pa(in)ted & slept there for the night. On the morning of the 5th all being done we proceeded on our return to Surabaya—during the intervals of my leisure Hours at Bangel I endeavoured to collect any thing of the History of the Country but either the people could not understand me & I could not explain myself to them, they told me there was nobody who knew any thing of the Ancient History, excepting that the Island of Java was uninhabited, & the Rajahs of Kling transported all their Convicts to it, these people being of the Bramin’s Religion brought their worship with them & built Temples, but no one knows how long this was & it is to them that the Javanese owe their Origin.
I have the honour to be
Sir
Your Most Obedient
Humble Servant
Lucius Rawdon Burke
Simpang
5th April 1812
Appendix B. Reproductions of Javanese Inscriptions Produced during British Rule and in the Following Decades
Each reproduction is referred to by a code consisting of the collection in which it is held, followed by their shelfmark within that collection. If the reproduction constitutes only a part of the whole item, we also give the folio numbers on which the reproduction is found. If the manuscript lacks page or folio numbers, the sections are denoted by their total number of folia.
Key for collection abbreviations:
| British Library, London |
BL |
| Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford |
Bodl. |
| India Office Library (now in BL) |
IOL |
| Kern Institute, Leiden (now in UBL) |
KI |
| Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (now in UBL) |
KITLV |
| Leiden University Library |
UBL |
| National Library of Indonesia, Jakarta |
PNRI |
|
Reproduction |
Inscription(s) |
Contents |
|---|---|---|
|
Bodl. MS Jav. c. 2 |
Cane |
f. 1: Opening note by L.H. Davey, with basic sketch of the Cane stone. ff. 2–11: Eye copy of Cane in Kawi script, with interlinear transcription into Modern Javanese script (red ink) and piecewise translation into Modern Javanese language, probably by Natakusuma ff. 12–21: Translation of Natakusuma’s Javanese translation into English by Davey. |
|
BL MSS Jav 95 (ex-IOL Jav 95) |
Hantang |
f. 1: Eye copy of Hantang in Kawi script, with interlinear transcription into Modern Javanese (red ink) and continuous translation into Modern Javanese language, probably by Natakusuma. |
|
BL Add. 12321 |
Cane |
ff. 85r–94r: Eye copy of Cane in Kawi script. |
|
BL Add. 12399 |
Baru |
ff. 59v–58v: Eye copy of Baru in Kawi script, covering A1–A11.98 |
|
KI K 72 |
Sangguran |
Estampage of Sangguran |
|
KITLV Or. 41 |
Balingawan |
ff. 1–2: Eye copy of Balingawan. |
|
KTLV Or. 42 |
Balingawan |
ff. 1–4: Eye copy of Balingawan, with translation into Modern Javanese script under the words (red ink). Originally belonging to the collection of N. Engelhard. |
|
KITLV Or. 233/8 |
Unidentified |
Eye copy of an unidentified inscription, with a modern Javanese translation. |
|
PNRI KBG 42 |
Kudadu Bimalasrama Baru Sangguran |
4 ff.: Eye copy of Kudadu in Kawi script (black ink) with interlinear transcription in Modern Javanese script (red ink), covering plates 2 and 3 of the set. 4 ff. Eye copy of Bimalasrama in Kawi script (black ink) with interlinear transcription in Modern Javanese script (red ink), covering plates 9 and 11 of the set. 2 ff.: Eye copy of Baru in Kawi script, covering A1–A11, b4–b29, and e1–e3 of the text. 4 ff.: Eye copy of Sangguran in Kawi script, covering B10–B45 of the text. 1 f.: Eye copy of short excerpts from one or more inscriptions; text obscure though containing names characteristic of the reign of Daksa (910–918 CE). 1 f.: Miscellaneous notes in Modern Javanese script with interlinear annotations; no obvious connection to inscriptions. |
|
UBL Or. 2026 |
Baru Wurare |
ff. 1–25: Diagram of Baru stele with detail of emblem, eye copy of Baru in three columns, containing Kawi script, transcription in Modern Javanese script (red ink), and translation into Malay language. Prepared by Natakusuma as Sultan of Sumenep, dated 7 Mulud 1774 [Javanese year] = 5 March 1846. ? ff.: Translation of the Wurare inscription into Malay. |
|
UBL Or. 2245 |
Banyu Biru Tuban Talan Tulangan Wurare Sangaw Waharu IV |
4 ff.: Eye copy of the Banyu Biru stone. ? ff.: Eye copy of the Tuban inscription. ? ff.: Eye copy of Banyu Biru with transcription into Modern Javanese script and translation into Modern Javanese language. ? ff.: Eye copy of the Talan stone. ? ff.: Eye copy of an inscription on a Manjuśrī statue. ? ff.: Three eye copies of a Sumatran inscription of Adityawarman. ? ff.: Eye copy of the Tulangan inscription. ? ff.: Eye copy of the Wurare inscription. ? ff.: Eye copy of the Sangaw inscription from Borneo. ? ff.: Eye copy of the Waharu IV inscription. ? ff.: Eye copy of an unknown inscription. |
|
UBL Or. 3093 |
Kudadu |
12 ff.: Eye copy of Kudadu in Kawi script (black ink) with interlinear transcription in Modern Javanese script (red ink), covering plates 1, 3–6, 8, and 10–12 of the set. |
Appendix C. Inscriptions Issued during the Reign of Wawa and His Predecessors
In this and following tables, we spell names and titles according to the loose transliteration scheme employed in the translation, rather than the Indonesianized spelling used in the body of the article; hence, the kings Wawa and Sindok appear here as Vava and Siṇḍok.
|
Inscription |
Date |
Provenance |
King |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Kambang Sri A |
14 October 926 |
Jedung, Mojokerto, East Java |
– |
|
Harinjing C |
7 March 927 |
Siman, Pare, East Java |
– |
|
Palebuhan (reissue) |
5 May 927 |
Gorang Gareng, Magetan, East Java |
pu Vāgīśvara (posthumous) |
|
Wangbang Bahen |
July/August 927 |
Bagelen (?), Central Java |
pu Vāgīśvara (posthumous) |
|
Wulakan |
14 February 928 |
Central Java? |
dyah Vava (child of kryan Laṇḍeyan) |
|
Kinawe |
28 February 928 |
Berbek, Nganjuk, East Java |
dyah Vava (rakai Sumba) (Siṇḍok as rakryān mapatih) |
|
Sangguran |
2 August 928 |
Ngandat, Malang, East Java |
dyah Vava (rakai Paṅkaja) (Siṇḍok as rakryān mapatih) |
|
Air Kali (reissue) |
[lost] |
Mount Kawi, East Java |
dyah Vava (rakai Sumba) |
|
Kambang Sri B |
[illegible] |
Jedung, Mojokerto, East Java |
[Vava]99 (Siṇḍok as rakryān mapatih) |
|
Panggumulan III |
[illegible] |
Blooto, Prajurit Kulon, Mojokerto, East Java100 |
[Vava] |
Appendix D. Invocation Formula in Inscriptions of Java and Bali, Late Ninth–Mid Twelfth Century
The following invocation formula is found in many inscriptions of the tenth century, particularly those issued during the reign of Sindok. It first appears in the late ninth century in Central Java, and there are later versions from East Java and Bali. The basic form of the invocation in Java is
kita prasiddha maṅrakṣa kaḍatvan śri mahāraja/ra hyaṅta i
You who are known to have protected the palaces of the kings/ancestors at
while the Balinese version reads
kita prasiddha rumakṣa bhūmi hyaṅta ri bali, ṅuniveh sakvaihniṅ rājadhānī
You who are known to have protected the land of the ancestors on Bali, especially all of the royal palaces
There are minor variations of wording (for example, the inclusion of devata ‘deities’ or sakvaih ‘all’, and the occasional substitution of bhūmi/pr̥thivī ‘land’ for kaḍatvan ‘palaces’).101
-
kita tuvi sakveḥ ta devatā, prasiddha maṁrakṣa kaḍatuAn· śrī mahārāja I bhūmi I mataram·
-
Wuatan Tija 2v6, ? 10 October 880
-
-
sakvaiḥ ta devata prasiddha maṁrakṣa kaḍatvan· śrī mahārāja I bhūmi java
-
Rukam 2r14, 19 October 907 CE
-
-
kita tuvi sakvaiḥ ta devata prasiddha rumakṣa kaḍatvan· śrī mahārāja Iṁ bhūmi I matarām·
-
Watu Ridang 1v1–2, 910 CE
-
-
sakvaiḥ ta devata prasiddha maṁrakṣa (ka)ḍatvan· śrī mahārāja Iṁ bhūmi matarām·
-
Sugih Manek B29, 13 September 915
-
-
kita tuvi sakvaiḥ ta devata prasiddha rumakṣaṁ kadatvan śrī mahārāja I mataram·
-
Gilikan Xv6, circa 920s CE
-
-
kita prasiddha maṁrakṣa kaḍatvan· śrī mahārāja I mḍaṁ Iṁ bhūmi matarām·
-
Sangguran B26, 928 CE
-
-
kita prasiddha maṁrakṣa pr̥thivi
-
Gulung-gulung d7–8, 20 April 929
-
-
kita tuvi sakveḥ ta hyaṁ prasiddha rumakṣaṁ kaḍatvan· śrī mahārāja bhūmi matarām·
-
Turyan B24, 24 July 929
-
-
kita prasiddha maṁrakṣaṁ kaḍatvan śrī mahārāja I mḍaṁ Iṁ bhūmi matarām·
-
Linggasuntan B26, 3 September 929
-
-
ki[ta prasiddha] (ru)mākṣa kaḍatuAn· śrī mahārāja I mḍaṁ, I bhūmi ⟨ma⟩taram·
-
Kampak C5–6, circa 929
-
-
kita prasiddha maṁrakṣa pr̥thivī
-
Jeru-jeru c5–6, 26 May 930
-
-
kita prasiddha maṁrakṣa [ka]ḍatuAn· śrī mahārāja I mḍaṁ Iṁ bhūmi matarām·
-
Paradah I 2A31–B2, 24 March 934
-
-
kita prasiddha maṁrakṣa kaḍatuAn ra hyaṁta I mḍaṁ I bhūmi mataram i vatu galuḥ
-
Anjuk Ladang B31–32, ? 10 April 937
-
-
kita pra[siddha] ma(ṁ)rakṣa ka(ḍatvan·) śrī mahārāja I mḍaṁ Iṁ bhūmi matarām·
-
Alasantan 3r19–4r1, 6 September 939
-
-
prasi⟨ddha⟩ manrakṣa kaḍatuAn ra hyaṁta I mḍaṁ Iṁ bhūmi mataram· Iṁ vatu galuḥ
-
Paradah II B25–26, 10 July 943
-
-
kita prasiddha ma(ṁ)ra(kṣa) ⟨ka⟩datuAn· ra hyaṁta I mḍaṁ Iṁ bhūmi mataram· Iṁ vatu galuḥ
-
Muncang c. 39–42, 3 March 944
-
-
kita prasiddha rumakṣa kadatvan· ri mḍaṁ, ri bhūmi matarām·, ri vatu galuḥ
-
Wwahan C. 11–12, 985 CE
-
-
[ki]ta prasiddha rakṣa kaḍatvan· ra hyaṁta ri mḍaṁ, ra gumi
-
Bimalasrama 11r1, circa 1020s CE (possibly inauthentic)102
-
-
kita prasiddha rumakṣa bhŭmi hyaṅta ri bali, ṅuniveh sākvaihniṅ răjadhănī,
-
Batuan 6v4, 26 December 1022
-
-
kita prasiddha rumakṣa bhumī hyaṅta ri bali, ṅuniveḥ sakvaihniṅ răjathāni
-
Prasi A 10v5, 5 May 1148
-
-
kita prasiddha (ru)makṣa bhumī hyaṅta ri bali, ṅuniveh sakvehniṅ rājadhănĭ
-
Campetan 7r5–6, 1 December 1149
-
A handful of inscriptions exhibit more substantial variations of wording in the formula (for example, lacking the prasiddha element):
-
kamu, ra hyaṅta rumuhun ri mḍaṅ, ri poḥ pitu
‘you deities of old, at Məḍaṅ, at Poh Pitu’
-
Mantyasih I, 2r9, 11 April 907 CE
-
-
sahananta rumakṣa saka⟨la⟩-bhumi103-maṇḍala
‘all you who protect the whole circle of the earth’
-
Air Kali 6r5, circa 928 CE (possibly inauthentic)
-
-
kita samaṁrakṣa kadatuan·
‘you who protect the palace(s)’
-
Waharu II plate 6, 24 May 929
-
-
sahananta rumakṣa bhūmi-maṇḍala
‘all you who protect the circle of the earth’
-
Waharu IV 6r1, ? 12 August 931 (possibly inauthentic)
-
Appendix E. High Officials during the Reign of Wawa and the Early Reign of Sindok
This table synthesizes data from representative dated inscriptions from the reign of Wawa (namely, Kinawe and Sangguran) and from the first two years of the reign of Sindok (Gulung-gulung, Turyan, Sarangan, Linggasuntan, Jeru-jeru, and Masahar).
|
Office |
Wawa’s reign (928) |
Sindok’s early reign (929–930) |
|---|---|---|
|
Śrī Mahārāja |
dyah Vava |
pu Siṇḍok |
|
rakryān mapatih |
pu Siṇḍok |
– |
|
rakryān i Hino |
pu Siṇḍok |
pu Siṇḍok104 |
|
rakryān i Sirikan |
pu Madaṅ / pu Amarendra |
pu Amarendra / pu Sahasra105 |
|
rakryān i Vəka |
pu Balyaṅ |
pu/dyah106 Balyaṅ |
|
rakryān i Maḍaṇḍər |
pu Padma |
pu Padma |
|
rakryān i Aṅgəhan |
pu Kuṇḍala |
pu Kuṇḍala |
|
samgat i Tiruan |
ḍapunta Taritip |
ḍapunta Taritip |
|
rakryān i Mamrati |
havaṅ Vicakṣana |
havaṅ Vicaksana |
|
rakryān i Pulu Vatu |
pu Paṇḍamuan |
pu Paṇḍamuan |
|
rakryān i Halaran |
pu Guṇottama |
pu Guṇottama/dyah Surendra |
|
rakryān Maṅhuri |
pu Maṅuvil and pu Sagara |
pu Paṇḍamuan/dyah Narendra |
|
rakryān i Vadihati |
pu Dinakara |
saṅ Dinakara |
|
rakryān i Makudur |
pu Balavān |
pu Balavān |
Appendix F. Inscriptions Containing Descriptions of the Sīma Feast
The following table lists the inscriptions starting with Sangguran that were already used by Timbul Haryono in his 1980 study (Sangguran, Sarangan, Anjuk Ladang, Paradah II) plus the ones that we add to these for comparison of the descriptions of the feast. In the absence of an explicitly cited alternative phrase, the description of the feast starts with the same phrase as in Sangguran, namely i tlas saṅ makudur maṅuyut masalin sira kabaih kapva maluṅguh iṅ tkan pasək.
|
Inscription |
Śaka year |
Description of the feast starts |
|---|---|---|
|
Sangguran |
850 |
B39 |
|
Linggasuntan |
851 |
c1 |
|
Gulung-gulung |
851 |
d28 ri tlasniṅ manusuk lumkas ta makurən-kurən ri sira kabaih |
|
Sarangan |
851 |
— |
|
Jeru-jeru |
852 |
c23 i tlasniṅ manaṅaskāra kinon saṅ mapatih vahuta rāma tpi siriṅ kabaih … luməkas ta makurən-kurən |
|
Masahar |
852 |
d1 |
|
Paradah I |
856 |
2B18 |
|
Anjuk Ladang |
857 |
B47 i tlas saṅ vahuta hyaṅ kudur (rest not yet deciphered) |
|
Alasantan |
861 |
4r11 |
|
Paradah II |
865 |
B39 i tlas saṅ vahuta hyaṅ kudur maṅuyut mapaṅti sira kabaih |
|
Kampak |
lost |
uncertain due to extensive damage, but some snippets of the description are preserved on the left lateral face |
ṅunivaiḥ yan ḍavuta saṁ hyaṁ vatu sīma (B30); see § 5.3 and § 5.4 below.
The nineteenth-century sources we draw upon talk about the region of Malang as including what is now administratively part of the city of Batu, to the north-west of Malang city centre. We follow the sources in this respect, so when we write of a ‘Malang provenance’ for the stone, this is understood to include all the areas between present-day Malang and Batu.
The drawing is held by the British Library under shelfmark WD953 f. 83 (94), for which the catalogue entry is available at:
This 1813 letter, held in the British Library with shelfmark MSS Eur F 148/47 (ff. 3r–4v), mentions a facsimile copy of the stone and a drawing of it; these are almost certainly the same reproductions that Mackenzie had ordered Burke and Newman to produce the previous year. For a transcription of the letter to Minto, see Gallop 1995:118–9.
Other Javanese inscriptions too, including several items issued during the reign of Airlangga (1019–1052), were reportedly discovered in the first half of the nineteenth century in ‘Surabaya’. Rather than the modern-day city, this designation must have referred to the wider area of the residentie of Surabaya. See Titi Surti Nastiti, Eko Bastiawan and Griffiths 2022:79–80, n. 32–34, § 4.3.
For all references to other inscriptions, see the list of primary sources at the end of this study (Bibliography, ‘Epigraphic Sources’).
Suwardono (2013) argues that Mananjung should be identified with the well-known site of Songgoriti near Batu, due to the nearby presence of toponyms related to smithing, such as Kemasan and Pandesari. However, our enquiries with local residents have indicated that these toponyms are hardly known.
The catalogue entry for this manuscript is accessible at:
The paal was a unit of distance used in the Netherlands Indies, which varied by region. In Java, it was equivalent to 1506.943 metres (De Beer and Laurillard 1899:873, s.v. paal, available from
This statement implies prima facie that Mackenzie personally discovered the stone at this site. However, there is good reason to believe that this was not the case. Mackenzie’s journals for March 1812 indicate that his tour of the Malang region did not involve a trip to Batu but, rather, that he journeyed directly from Malang to Bangil (British Library MSS Eur Mack Private 14, item 15, p. 246). Since Newman’s drawing of the Minto stone was made at Bangil, with a caption stating its Malang origin, we believe it is quite conceivable that Mackenzie first encountered the stone there in April 1812, either at the same time as Newman or shortly beforehand.
Blasius Suprapta (2015:172, 246) proposes a set of identifications that differs in large part from ours. While admitting that the stone was discovered in Ngandat, he suggests that the ancient village of Sangguran can be identified with the present-day village of Sanggrahan (does he mean Pesanggrahan?) in Batu. Concerning the neighbouring villages, he proposes that Tugaran is the hamlet of Tenggarong on Gunung Buring (east of Kota Malang); Kajatan (following Brandes’s reading, where we read Kajavān) is the hamlet of Klayatan in kecamatan Sukun (west of Kota Malang); Bungkalingan is the hamlet of Sengkaling in kecamatan Dau (kabupaten Malang, as in our identification); whereas Tampur is the hamlet of Tempuran in the village of Madyopuro (east of Kota Malang). Subsequently, he associates the toponym of Mananjung with the kelurahan Tanjungrejo, in kecamatan Sukun.
Mackenzie may have been acting of his own accord, since the letter he sent accompanying the stone does not mention Raffles, who was his immediate superior (Gallop 1995:118–9). However, Raffles seems to have become aware of the stone at an early point, since he had sent his own letter to Minto anticipating the arrival of the stone in Scotland (Raffles 1817, II:ccxxi).
Mackenzie was hopeful that the Minto stone might allow British scholars to take the lead in the decipherment of the Kawi script used in early Java: ‘it would be gratifying to find this further elucidation of Oriental letters reserved for some British subject’ (Gallop 1995:119). Instead, it would be the German scholar R.H.Th. Friederich who ended up making this breakthrough in the 1850s (Friederich 1854–1857, 1856).
Gallop 1995:118–9. In this publication, Mackenzie’s letter is presented as if it refers to the Pucangan inscription of Airlangga, but Hasan Djafar (2010:225) clarified that it actually refers to the Sangguran charter.
The Javanese script used here, perhaps due to its eastern coastal origins, more closely resembles modern Balinese script than the Surakarta style that became the standard Javanese script during the nineteenth century.
See Friederich’s (1854–1857:4) useful comments: ‘Crawfurd already understood that the translations of these and other inscriptions made in English times do not deserve confidence (Indian Archipelago II. 213. Cf. Von Humboldt Ueber die Kawisprache etc. I. 216). His reason is that no two of the so-called Javanese Kawi connoisseurs delivered an identical translation. Von Humboldt scolds Crawfurd unfairly for not having made use of those inscriptions. Anyone who carefully examines the transcriptions of the above-mentioned inscriptions and the translations of three stone inscriptions in Raffles II Appendix 227–237 will also realise that no firm conclusion can be drawn from them.’ Here and below, all modern-language citations from sources not originally written in English are rendered by us in translation.
KBG 42 contains transcriptions and eye copies of various inscriptions. The relevant pages of the manuscript containing a partial transcription of the Sangguran charter are marked in pencil with the words ‘Minto steen’ (Dutch for ‘Minto stone’). For further details on this and other reproductions of Javanese inscriptions, see Appendix B.
By the 1950s, these photographs were still in Jakarta but were ‘completely yellowed’, according to Damais (1951:28; 1955:102), who cited them as ‘Photo BG II 852–856’.
A set of estampages of the inscription was once available in the Kern Institute collections at Leiden University (number K72) but could not be traced during our work on documenting the Leiden estampages (
See Edhie Wurjantoro 2011:254–69. The relevant pages are accessible online, though not open access, via
A letter to the father of the present Earl of Minto, dated 31 May 2004, is kept at Minto Estate, with one of the estampages made by Nakada. The availability of estampages such as this one and the set (formerly) at Leiden is no longer so vital, as we are now able to produce digital imagery that surpasses any estampage in terms of legibility and functionality.
For an account of the lengthy lead-up to the 2020 repatriation from Delft, see Van Beurden 2021. A further tranche of objects was transferred to Indonesian ownership on 10 July 2023; see the Dutch government’s press release
Quoted in Van Beurden 2017:140. The original text of the Indonesian delegation’s statement can be consulted at the National Archive in the Hague, Archive of the Foreign Ministry 1975–1984, inv. no. 10266. See
The history of the monastery’s founding is recounted at
Adams’s report indeed mentioned the presence of ‘an old Hindoo Mut [maṭha], or small temple, near which was a group of old Images, small and much defaced, probably collected by Colonel Mackenzie’ (MSS Eur Mack Private 86.I, part 7, p. 107). Archaeological excavations at the Pendem site in Junrejo, which took place in three phases from December 2019 to February 2020, revealed foundations of a brick temple dateable between the tenth and twelfth centuries CE. The archaeologist M. Dwi Cahyono has suggested that the older parts of the temple’s structure can be identified as ‘the holy devotional temple at the smithy sīma at Manañjuṅ’ (saṁ hyaṁ prasāda kabhaktyan· Iṁ sīma kajuru-gusalyan· I manañjuṁ) mentioned in the Sangguran charter (A8) (Dwi Cahyono 2020).
-nirataḥ ◇ corr. -niratāḥ. The corrections proposed here and in the next few notes follow from comparison with the Sugih Manek charter and with the Indian sources discussed below (§ 7.2).
bhavāntu ◇ corr. bhavantu.
nāśām· ◇ corr. nāśam·.
-nāmostuṅga ◇ corr. -nāmottuṅga.
puṅguhan· ◇ corr. paṅguhan·.
śakalbiḥnya ◇ corr. sakalbiḥnya.
piṇḍat· ◇ The reading is clear, but a scribal error is suspected. Emend si ṇḍat? Or else si piṇḍat·? Or piṇḍa 2? Or piṇḍa?
After I kajavān·, the engraver must have unintentionally skipped a name that would have been introduced by si. We have no way of knowing what the name was nor even how many characters it would have occupied.
riṁ kanaraka ◇ corr. rikaṁ naraka.
maṅu(y)uk· ◇ corr. maṅuyut·.
yathāsuka ◇ corr. yathāsukha.
s⟦u⟧mpun· ◇ the result of the engraver’s erasure of the mistakenly engraved suku is the expected word sampun·.
The term sīma, and the social institution it designates, is centrally important in Javanese epigraphy; its near total irrelevance in inscriptions from other islands, such as Bali and Sumatra, reinforces its cultural centrality on Java. Borrowed from the Sanskrit sīman ‘boundary’, in Java sīma refers to a demarcation of land whose output (revenue, labour, etc.) has been diverted, and/or whose rights and obligations have been altered by a high authority, most often the king (Barrett Jones 1984:59–62). A large majority of extant Javanese charters govern the conditions of particular sīma domains, which are generally on the scale of one or a few village communities. The term has been translated into English variously as ‘freehold’, ‘free territory’, or ‘benefice’, but none of these European concepts map precisely onto the range of meanings inherent in the Javanese term. For this reason, we leave the term untranslated.
This name is ambiguously expressed. Since the list of names sometimes includes and sometimes omits personal articles (si or ḍa pu), we cannot be sure that the person’s name is to be read Śyaṅgudī with omitted article (presumably si), and that it is not the result of sandhi of the article si (here spelled with initial ś instead of s) and the name Aṅgudī.
We supply punctuation between the names Suji and Sugas in our edition, as all the other names in this list are single words and Suji appears alone in Alasantan (1r5).
The expression umahayva asiṅ samananā is an equivalent, not attested elsewhere, of the expression umyāpāra asiṅ samananā found in Masahar (A5) and Linggasuntan (A6). See Titi Surti Nastiti, Eko Bastiawan and Griffiths 2022:186.
The term śivacaru occurs by itself in Garaman (2v6). While nivedya probably implies an offering of non-animal food to Śiva, caru might imply an animal sacrifice to the deity. See Dharma Pātañjala f. 68v (Acri 2017:310, lines 1–3) hana ta vuvusniṅ vaneh, tan apa rakvaṅ vaṅ māti-māti sattva, yan carva ri saṅ hyaṅ, athavā bhojana kunaṅ, maṅkana pakənanya, tātan maṅkana saṅ yogi ‘There are the words of others: “It does not matter that the men kill animals, if they are to be sacrificed to the gods, or for food: such is their use.” The yogin is not like that.’
We do not yet feel we have reached a sufficient understanding of this term, which is omnipresent in Old Javanese epigraphy, to translate it. As for Jan Wisseman Christie, recalling that miśra means ‘various’ in Sanskrit, she suggested (1993:185, see also p. 203) that the category thus designated ‘appears to have encompassed a number of part-time, semi-professional manufacturing and processing industries which were operated in some farming households in most Javanese villages of the time’.
On the interpretation of the term vulu-vulu, see Titi Surti Nastiti, Eko Bastiawan and Griffiths 2022:193–4.
The phrase tluṅ tuhān iṅ sasambyavahāra iṅ sasīma was translated by Sarkar as ‘three masters for each trade per freehold’, while he translated kalima vantal iṅ satuhān pikul-pikulananya iṅ sasīma (just below in A28) as ‘the fifth vantal for each master of the pikul in each freehold’, without any comment on why multiple freeholds (that is, sīma) should be implied. The Sangguran charter, however, only defines the conditions of the Saṅguran sīma itself, and not of the smithy sīma at Manañjuṅ. It just so happens that the beneficiary of the Saṅguran grant resides within the smithy sīma. Indeed, it seems that only a single sīma is concerned in this as in all of the other inscriptions where we find regulations expressed with sasīma. More intuitive translations would perhaps be ‘per trade in the whole sīma’ and ‘per master tradesman for the whole sīma’, and this seems to have been the interpretation adopted by Barrett Jones (1983:37–9), although she does not specifically discuss the meaning of the sa-prefixed expressions. We nevertheless steer closer to Sarkar’s interpretation, as sa-… sa-… expressions are normally distributive in meaning and it seems unnatural to give two very different interpretations to the prefix sa-. We tentatively propose the hypothesis that this regulatory formula, found in numerous records, reflects a general legal rule, which would have become part of the template for defining the privileges of sīma territories in a hypothetical corpus of regulatory texts, from which it would have been quoted without being adapted to the specific contexts where it occurs.
We have paḍahi not (m)apaḍahi, so strictly this is just ‘drums’ not ‘drum players’. This is likely a simple inconsistency in the composition of the list, since in other charters, we do find (m)apaḍahi.
Zoetmulder (1982) defines this term as ‘the blade of a plane’ (s.v. pamaja 2), but some eleventh-century inscriptions suggest that pamaja can refer to wootz steel as a raw material. In Sima Anglayang (5v4), pamaja occurs amongst other raw-metal commodities, as it does here, while in Anjatan (3v7), it is substituted by vaja ‘steel’ in the same commodities list. However, in the early tenth century, it seems consistently to be listed among other utensils.
The form adhikāna is apparently an irrealis passive from *umadhike ‘to exceed’; it seems that Zoetmulder (1982, s.vv. adhikāra I.2 and tan adhikara) has not precisely understood the expression tan adhikāna.
Except here, this type of cloth appears in gift lists exclusively in inscriptions issued by Sindok when he was king; see Wisseman Christie 1993:189.
Marendra is a slightly shortened form of the name Amarendra. The same minister (whose full name appears in Panggumulan III A5, Kambang Sri B, Linggasuntan A28, Jeru-jeru A21, and Kampak A11) is referred to as dyah Mare in Demak A12 and Turyan A22.
In this section, and throughout the rest of this translation, we supply status indicators for names based on whether the same individuals are designated as paməgat or rakryān in other inscriptions.
This string of three names is difficult to parse. Havaṅ appears most frequently as a personal name (Damais 1970:109), while Mamrati/Amrati is a common toponym. So, can we interpret this as ‘the [Lord of] Amrati (called) Havaṅ Vicakṣana’, with a bipartite and mixed-language name, as seen also in the cases of pu Variga Samaravikrānta and pu Bvalu Saṅgramādurandhara (both of whom are mentioned in the Panggumulan I and Samalagi charters)?
Between the names saṅ (Bhū/Ra)te and saṅ Variṅin, there are two illegible characters though none are expected here. There may be a connection with the appearance of the additional material starting on the next line (A38).
Is it the same Kulumpaṅ as the one mentioned in B7?
The term pakaraṇān, which appears frequently in East Javanese inscriptions of the tenth century (and never in records that are known with certainty to originate in Central Java), is not recorded by Zoetmulder (1982). The occurrence in the (alas not clearly provenanced) Wurudu Kidul inscription was interpreted by Stutterheim (1935:449) as meaning ‘law court’ (with reference to the Sanskrit adhikaraṇa). We prefer to gloss it as ‘secretariat’, drawing on one of the important meanings of karaṇa, namely ‘scribe’, in the Sanskrit context. This interpretation is supported by the fact that many members of the list are heralds (parujar); indeed, in some Central Javanese inscriptions we find the term paṅujaran used apparently as equivalent to pakaraṇān (Rukam 1v11, Lintakan 1v13).
Damais (1970:93, n. 2) suggests that this person’s name is Ukat, which merged in sandhi to the personal article saṅ ra to produce saṅ Rokat. However, other occurrences of this name in the Sindok corpus (which Damais did not use in his study) where the personal article is absent confirm that Rokat is the correct reading (for example, Gulung-gulung B11, Jeru-jeru B2).
The interpretation of the roles in the sīma ceremony of the people mentioned here, introduced by the phrase lumaku manusuk, remains largely a mystery. Two of the roles, namely the ones said to be ‘for Vadihati’ and ‘for Makudur’, are always encountered in such contexts, but the Sangguran charter is unique in including two others: ‘for Susuhan’ and ‘for Tapa Haji’. The Susuhan figures, though not in lumaku manusuk contexts, in Masahar B5 and Wulig A2, A7. The Tapa Haji figures in numerous inscriptions (as here in A13) but, again, never in lumaku manusuk contexts.
The name Piṅul also occurs in Masahar B28 but seems to denote a different person there.
We interpret the verb matətəṅən as applying to all the persons listed. Since the verb designating the categories of participants in the feast ceremony usually stands at the head of the list of names, we conclude that its position as the penultimate elements of the list before si Luluk is due to some kind of scribal error. Damais (1970:286 n. 1) found the last syllable of matətəṅən hard to read. Although we feel it can be read ṅə, there is no clarity as to whether this hapax legomenon is a name or not in the present context. Zoetmulder (1982) gives for mətətəṅ ‘to pull a face’, but from the single occurrence in the Sumanasāntaka (113.5, aṅigəl-igəl agəṅ-gə̄ṅan koṇṭol paḍa mətətə̄ṅ), it probably has the meaning ‘to protrude’, with the secondary meaning of ‘puffing oneself up, strutting around with one’s chest out’. It may well be a comedic activity similar to jesting (abañol). See the Modern Javanese lexicographical data at
Could ananta be ana-nta, that is, equivalent to anak-ta? Before hyaṁ kālamr̥tyu, most inscriptions read anakta.
Gonda (1973:525) gives an extended discussion of the various Old Javanese uses of the Sanskrit loanword prasiddha. Zoetmulder (1982) lists two senses: the first conveying a perfective sense ‘carried out, accomplished’ that may be close to modern Indonesian sudah, and the second with the meaning of ‘well-known’. The translation ‘known to have’ attempts to capture both of these meanings, which seem to be simultaneously expressed when the term is used in inscriptions, particularly in the kita prasiddha invocation formula (see Appendix D).
Zoetmulder (1982) only records kabvat-karmanta and kabvat-karmakənanta ‘you will suffer the result of your actions (karma)’. But the expression with karma is not used in the Wawa-Sindok corpus, where we only find kabvataknanya. It is hard to grasp how grammar and meaning interact here. Grammatically, we expect the form to mean ‘let it be done by him’ but this is contextually unsuitable; the contextual meaning seems to be the one most suited and therefore is the one chosen for our translation here.
Zoetmulder (1982) only records pǝkan pasǝk ‘a square near the palace (where those who offer pasĕk assemble)’, but the inscriptions of this period consistently present what seems to be the same term in the form təkan pasǝk.
The expression saṅ hana riṅ kon might be an equivalent to the expression maṅagam kon commonly used in earlier periods to express a meaning like ‘holding office’, but we tentatively opt for a word-for-word interpretation ‘to be in the capacity’.
For detailed commentary on this whole paragraph, see § 7.6 below.
We are rather uncertain as to how to interpret the verb form umaṅsə̄ here in B44 and in c4 below. The fact that the particle ta is used in both instances suggests a change of subject. We hesitantly assume that jnu, skar, rujak, and baṅlus are the respective subjects and on this basis propose ‘were put forward’ as contextually more suitable equivalent to ‘came forward’. But this interpretation forces us to assume another (unmarked) change of subject for linarih in c4.
The fact that the puppetry is specified as having occurred ‘in the night’ (Irikanaṁ vṅi) is probably at least in part in order to make a pun on the puppeteer’s name, Rahina, which means ‘day’. As wayang performances are nocturnal affairs today, in tenth-century Java too, they would have happened at night.
This software for converting dates expressed in Indic calendars, developed originally as a standalone system by Chris Eade and Lars Gislén, has recently been cast into a revised online form and is available at
This phenomenon was noted by Damais (1951:13) and confirmed by Eade and Gislén (2001:6–7), so we disagree with De Casparis’s claim that the conflation of tithi and civil day only occurred ‘after the ancient period’, that is, after 1500 CE (De Casparis 1978:9, n. 16).
See the edition by Dániel Balogh for the DHARMA project at
In the Masulipatam Plates granting the village Ṭraṇḍapaṟu, the stanza features in the penultimate position (no. X) and is edited by Dániel Balogh as follows: śivam astu sarvva-jagatāṁ para-hita-niratā bhavantu bhūta-gaṇā (d)oṣāḥ prayāntu nāśaṁ tiṣṭhatu suciraṁ jagati dharmmaḥ ||. See
śivam astu sarva-jagatāṁ para-hita-niratā bhavantu bhūta-gaṇāḥ | doṣāḥ prayāntu nāśaṁ sarvatra sukhī bhavatu lokaḥ ||. See Skilton 2009:222–3, 337 (‘this verse is not present in other recensions’). The only difference is the plural genitive form -jagatāṁ instead of the singular -jagataḥ.
Krom’s reading of Kinawe’s year of issue as 849 Śaka was correct, but his conversion was imprecise in that he did not take into account that it was issued in the month of Phalguna, which necessitates adding 79 rather than 78 to the year in order to convert it from the Śaka to the Common Era.
These lines (B31–32) state that it was inscribed ‘when the King first had a palace at Tamvəlaṅ’ (makatəvək· śrī mahārāja makaḍatvan· I tāmvlaṁ). This toponym is most likely identical to present-day Tembelang, in Jombang regency, East Java, though other identifications have been proposed (De Casparis 1988).
The toponym Medang first appears in Siwagerha (856 CE), where it refers to the site of a new palace in the district of Mamrati (De Casparis 1956:318). An official associated with Medang is mentioned in the Laguna inscription (900 CE), an Old Malay inscription from the Philippines (Clavé and Griffiths 2022). Medang is retrospectively associated with royal ancestors (ra hyaṅta) in two significant Javanese inscriptions of the early tenth century: Mantyasih I (907 CE) and Wanua Tengah III (908 CE).
Van der Meulen (1979:26) argued that the toponym Poh Pitu, which appears in Mantyasih (907 CE), is a synonym of Māmrati, based on the phonetic similarity of the element āmra, the Sanskrit equivalent of Old Javanese poh ‘mango’. This seems like a stretch to us. De Casparis (1956:300) considered Poh Pitu and Māmratipura to be separate toponyms.
The hypothesis that there existed multiple places called Medang is also influenced by later Javanese literary traditions, in which the toponym Medang refers to legendary places of origin, such as Medang Kemulan, Medang Gana, Medang Jati, and Medang Tanjung. The Tantu Paṅgəlaran (Robson and Hadi Sidomulyo 2021) and the Carita Parahyaṅan (Undang Ahmad Darsa and Edi Suhardi Ekadjati 1995), both compiled in the fifteenth or sixteenth century, offer the earliest examples of Medang used in this general sense. Several Medang toponyms appear in the Javanese folktale Sri Mahapunggung, a version of the Dewi Sri agricultural myth (Wessing 1990:240–1). The backwards extrapolation of the generic conception of Medang, from the early modern period to the tenth century, is unsound in our view (cf. Van der Meulen 1977:99, n. 45).
Examples of named religious institutions from Sindok’s inscriptions include ‘the monastery called Sobhamr̥ta’ (vihantən· maṅaran· riṁ sobhāmr̥ta) in Sobhamerta (2v4) and ‘the devotional temple called Siddhayoga’ (prasāda kabhaktyan· maṅaran· I siddhayoga) in Muncang (A12).
These references include palaces located at Wwatan Mas (Cane C24, Munggut 4.3, Kusambyan c48), Maḍaṇḍər (Kusambyan A34), Kahuripan (Kamalagyan 19), Tanjung (Malenga 4r1), and Katang-katang (Kemulan 14), all of which are clearly toponyms.
The same argument applies to the sentence ra hyaṁta rumuhun·, ri mḍaṁ, ri poḥ pitu in Mantyasih I (2r7–8), which is best translated as ‘ancestors of old, at Medang [and] at Poh Pitu’, as reflected in the Dutch translation by Stutterheim (1927:191).
An alternative translation, equally valid from a grammatical point of view, would be: ‘the palaces of the kings at Medang, [and those] in the land of Mataram, [and the one] at Watu Galuh’. Hadi Sidomulyo has suggested identifying Watu Galuh with ‘the present-day village of Watugaluh at Diwek, some 10 km south of Jombang. Archaeological remains are to be found in the immediate vicinity’ (email dated 16-11-2023).
We therefore disagree with De Casparis’s conjecture (1994:375) that ‘Sindok’s succession to the throne may have been somewhat irregular’. There is scant evidence as to what the rules of royal succession actually were in the Central Javanese period, but Sindok had been present at the highest levels of government since the Lintakan inscription (919), where he appeared as rakryān i Halu. Had the transition between Wawa and Sindok involved irregularity, we would expect to see some evidence of this in his early inscriptions (as we do for the eleventh-century Airlangga and the fourteenth-century Wijaya, both of whom came to power through civil war).
There is a possibility that this name refers to multiple people. The Balingawan inscription (891) mentions a ‘calligrapher, saṅ Lakṣana’ who, given the time gap, may not have been the same figure as the person referred to in Sangguran.
Leaving the structure of the list largely intact, we have nevertheless made some changes and included more explanation of the items than was furnished by Timbul Haryono. The scholar’s understanding of the data in his earlier article is in some cases obviously wrong, notably when he interprets phrases with the verb manamvah as meaning ‘menambah daun (adding flowers)’. In reality, manambah is to be translated into Indonesian as menyembah ‘to worship’. See, for example, the Taji charter (7r2) manamvaḥ Ikanaṁ rāma kabaiḥ ri saṁ hyaṁ vatu səmā, ri sampunya manamvaḥ kapuA ya kabaiḥ Umuvaḥ I ronya ‘all the headmen worshipped the holy sīma stone. After they had worshipped, all of them did it again to their (banana) leaves.’ It is noteworthy that the 1999 article avoids mention of which ritual act is performed with leaves.
Scribal error for yathāsukha.
We owe to Tom Hoogervorst a valuable reference to Mills’s reconstruction of Proto South Sulawesi, which contains this entry (Mills 1975:617): ‘?*anjA(p?) “offering”: Bug. ancɨq “offerings to spirits (hung on banyan trees on a small bamboo tray)”, Mak. anja2 “idem” (irreg. -ø). Cf. Batak añjap2, añjapan “k.o. altar”, but also Ml. Jav. añcak “bamboo stand or tray for offerings”.’
Robson (2015) translates, ‘The prawns seemed to have been baked, lying dry on the rocks’, though ‘boiled’ or ‘fried’ might also be suitable instead of ‘baked’.
Robson (2015) translates, ‘What is lacking? Should the side-dishes be increased with anything missing? Kurawung? kurapas? kurahan?’.
We owe these insights to Tom Hoogervorst, email dated 29-8-2020.
Again, we owe these insights to Tom Hoogervorst, in the same email.
We cite from § 235 in the draft edition being prepared by Timothy Lubin and Arlo Griffiths.
Some palm-leaf manuscripts from Lombok, previously held in the Museum Volkenkunde in Leiden and the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, were included in this package, as revealed by several items in the catalogue cited in n. 22. Provenance research on these items was not extensive before they were returned to Indonesia in 2023.
The most significant public collections are the Museum Volkenkunde, the Tropenmuseum, the Wereldmuseum in Rotterdam, the Royal Library in Copenhagen, and the Museum der Weltkulturen in Frankfurt.
For for other nuances on the repatriation debate, from the point of view of the textual historian, we refer to Sastrawan 2020–2021.
This refers to the Javanese aristocratic title tumenggung.
This toponym likely refers to the present-day kecamatan Candi, which is around 20 km north-west of Bangil. It clearly derives from candi, the modern Javanese term for an ancient temple site.
This eye copy is embedded in a manuscript largely containing texts in Arabic script, as a result of which the foliation is in descending order.
This badly damaged stone stele seems to contain two texts in series, denoted Kambang Sri A and B. The date of the B text remains unread. Thanks to 3D modelling of the stone by Adeline Levivier, in November 2022, we are able to read unpublished sections of the B text that contain lists of ministers closely matching those of Wawa’s other known inscriptions. We therefore assign Kambang Sri B to Wawa’s reign.
The identification of the suspected site of the stone was made by Hadi Sidomulyo during a recent survey in the area of Mojokerto.
The formula’s wording resembles a phrase found in the seventh-century Old Malay Sebokingking stele (line 20): kāmu maṅrakṣāña sakalamaṇḍalāña kadātuanku ‘you who protect the whole ambit of my kingdom’ (De Casparis 1956:35). In this context, however, the protectors being addressed are the king’s living subordinates, who are threatened with a curse if they are disloyal.
This example is highly problematic. The Bimalasrama inscription was reissued as a Majapahit-era copy, and of this copy, only two plates remain extant, while other parts of the inscription survive in nineteenth-century copies. The reading is therefore especially susceptible to scribal errors. Furthermore, this passage seems to have been inserted into the wrong context within the copy, since it does not connect to the text that follows. It is therefore unclear what, if anything, this example adds to our consideration of nomenclature in the eighth–tenth centuries.
The inscription reads numi, which must be emended to bhumi. See Waharu IV below.
Among all the inscriptions he issued as king, it is only in Gulung-gulung (929) that Sindok holds the office rakryān i Halu, which he once held a decade earlier in the Lintakan inscription (919). Throughout the 920s and 930s, Sindok consistently held the office rakryān i Hino instead. The anomaly in Gulung-gulung may be due to a scribal error, as it seems unlikely Sindok would have reverted to using a title from so much earlier in his career on only one occasion in 929.
Sahasra appears only once as rakryān i Sirikan, in the Sarangan inscription (929), after which the position returned to Amarendra.
Balyang sometimes appears with the personal article dyah instead of pu, which suggests a decree of interchangeability between pu and dyah in this context.
Bibliography
Epigraphic Sources
Whenever possible, we cite epigraphic evidence from new editions, made as part of the DHARMA project, which are to be published on the project’s online database that is presently under construction.
Air Kali—Set of at least seven copper plates of which only the sixth plate is available, East Java, Old Javanese. The first plate, which is usually engraved with the date, is lost. However, Wawa as king is mentioned on the sixth plate. Hence, the charter was probably issued in 849 or 850 Śaka (927 through to early 929CE). Kern 1917b:180–3.
Alasantan—Set of four copper plates, East Java, Old Javanese, 861 Śaka = 939CE. Wibowo 1979.
Anjatan—Two plates of an originally larger set of copper plates, found in Gunung Kidul (DIY), Old Javanese, undated. Rita Margaretha Setianingsih 1996; Griffiths 2021–2022:183–6.
Anjuk Ladang—Stone stele, East Java, Old Javanese, 859 Śaka = 937CE. Brandes 1913, no. XLVI.
Balingawan—Stone stele and Ganesha sculpture, East Java, Old Javanese, 813 Śaka = 891CE. Brandes 1913, nos. XIX–XX.
Baru—Stone stele, East Java, Old Javanese, 952 Śaka =1030CE. Brandes 1913, no. LX.
Batuan—Set of seven copper plates, Bali, Old Javanese, 944 Śaka = 1022CE. Goris 1954:96–101.
Bimalasrama—Seven copper plates (of a set consisting originally of more than twelve plates) found in the early nineteenth century. Only two of the plates found then are still preserved, most of the remainder can be read on eye copies made soon after their discovery. Fourteenth-century reissue of an Old Javanese charter, originally issued in the eleventh century in East Java. Brandes 1913, no. CXII (plates 8, 9, and 11); Van Stein Callenfels 1924 (plates 3 or 4, 7, and 10); Van Naerssen 1938 (plates 10 and 12).
Campetan—Set of eight copper plates, Bali, Old Javanese, 1071 Śaka = 1149CE. Puger 1964:7–44.
Cane—Stone stele, East Java, Old Javanese, 943 Śaka = 1021CE. Brandes 1913, no. LVIII.
Demak—Stone stele, East Java, Old Javanese, 855 Śaka = 933CE. Brandes 1913, no. XLV.
Garaman—Four copper plates, East Java, Old Javanese, 975 Śaka = 1053CE. Boechari 2012c:503–12.
Gilikan—Two copper plates, Central Java, Old Javanese, circa 920s CE. Brandes 1913, no. CII & CIII; Sarkar 1971–1972, no. 104 & 105.
Gulung-gulung—Stone stele, East Java, Old Javanese, 851 Śaka = 929CE. Brandes 1913, no. XXXVIII; Nakada 1990:2–21; Trigangga 2003:10–6, 35–49.
Hantang—Stone stele, East Java, Old Javanese, 1057 Śaka = 1135CE. Brandes 1913, no. LXVIII; Hasan Djafar and Trigangga 2019:82–9.
Harinjing C—Stone stele, East Java, Old Javanese, 849 Śaka = 927CE. Van Stein Callenfels 1934:116–9; Hasan Djafar and Trigangga 2019:92–4.
Jeru-jeru—Stone stele, East Java, Old Javanese, 852 Śaka = 930CE. Brandes 1913, no. XLIII; Nakada 1990:33–51; Trigangga 2003:28–32, 62–8.
Kamalagyan—Stone stele, East Java, Old Javanese, 959 Śaka = 1037CE. Brandes 1913, no. LXI.
Kambang Sri A & B—Stone stele, East Java, Old Javanese, 848 Śaka = 926CE (Kembang Sri A). Brandes 1913, no. XXXIII; Damais 1955:138–40; Sarkar 1971–1972, no. 92.
Kampak—Stone stele, East Java, Old Javanese, date lost but probably issued around 929CE. Brandes 1913, no. LII; Hasan Djafar and Trigangga 2019:120–5.
Kancana—Set of at least 14 copper plates, East Java, Old Javanese, 782 Śaka = 860CE & 1295 Śaka = 1373CE. Kern 1881; Sarkar 1971–1972, no. 22.
Kemulan—Stone stele, East Java, Old Javanese, 1116 Śaka = 1194CE. Brandes 1913, no. LXXIII.
Kinawe—Stone stele, East Java, Old Javanese, 849 Śaka = 928CE. Brandes 1913, no. XXXIII; Damais 1955:53–4; Sarkar 1971–1972, no. 95.
Kudadu—Set of at least 12 copper plates, East Java, Old Javanese, 1216 Śaka = 1294 Śaka. Brandes 1913, no. LXXXI.
Kusambyan—Stone stele, East Java, Old Javanese, 945 Śaka = 1023CE. Titi Surti Nastiti, Eko Bastiawan and Griffiths 2022:121–40.
Laguna—Single copper plate, Luzon (The Philippines), Old Malay, 822 Śaka = 900CE. Clavé and Griffiths 2022:180–1.
Linggasuntan—Stone stele, East Java, Old Javanese, 851 Śaka = 929CE. Brandes 1913, no. XXXIX; Nakada 1990:21–33; Trigangga 2003:19–25, 50–61.
Lintakan—Set of three copper plates, Central Java, Old Javanese, 841 Śaka = 919CE. Sarkar 1971–1972, no. 86.
Malenga—Set of six copper plates, East Java, Old Javanese, 974 Śaka = 1052CE. Boechari 2012c:500–3.
Mantyasih I—Set of two copper plates, Central Java, Old Javanese, 829 Śaka = 907CE. Stutterheim 1927:172–215; Sarkar 1971–1972, no. 70.
Masahar—Stone stele, East Java, Old Javanese, 852 Śaka = 930CE. Unpublished.
Muncang—Stone stele, East Java, Old Javanese, 866 Śaka = 944CE. Brandes 1913, no. LI.
Munggut—Stone stele, East Java, Old Javanese, 944 Śaka = 1022CE. Titi Surti Nastiti, Eko Bastiawan and Griffiths 2022:102–16.
Palebuhan—Set of two copper plates, East Java, Old Javanese, 849 Śaka = 927CE. Stutterheim 1935:433–7; Sarkar 1971–1972, no. 93.
Panggumulan III—Stone stele, East Java, Old Javanese, date illegible. Brandes 1913, no. XXXIV.
Paradah I—Stone stele, East Java, Old Javanese, 856 Śaka = 934CE. Unpublished.
Paradah II—Stone stele, East Java, Old Javanese, 865 Śaka = 943CE. Brandes 1913, no. XLVIII.
Prasi A—Set of at least ten copper plates, Bali, Old Javanese, 1070 Śaka = 1148CE. Goris, published by Semadi Astra (2023:268–71).
Pucangan—Stone stele, East Java, Sanskrit and Old Javanese, 963 Śaka = 1041CE. Kern 1885; Poerbatjaraka 1941:430–4; Kern 1917a:85–114; Brandes 1913, no. LXII.
Rukam—Set of two copper plates, Central Java, Old Javanese, 829 Śaka = 907CE. Titi Surti Nastiti, Dewi Dyah Wijaya, and Richadiana Kartakusuma 1982.
Samalagi—One copper plate, Central Java, Old Javanese, 824 Śaka = 902CE. Boechari 2012c:478–80.
Sarangan—Stone stele, East Java, Old Javanese, 851 Śaka = 929CE. Brandes 1913, no. XXXVII; Hasan Djafar and Trigangga 2019:216–24.
Sebokingking—Stone stele, South Sumatra, Old Malay, undated. De Casparis 1956:32–46. idenk.net item N. 158.
Sima Anglayang—Set of at least 17 copper plates, East Java, Old Javanese, 968 Śaka = 1046CE. Titi Surti Nastiti, Eko Bastiawan and Griffiths 2022:156–79.
Siwagerha—Stone stele, Central Java, Sanskrit and Old Javanese, 778 Śaka = 856CE. Damais 1955:24; De Casparis 1956:311–30; Sarkar 1971–1972, no. 19.
Sobhamerta—Set of seven copper plates, East Java, Old Javanese, reissued in the fourteenth century CE from an original dated 861 Śaka = 939CE. Titi Surti Nastiti 2007.
Sugih Manek—Stone stele, East Java, Old Javanese, 837 Śaka = 915CE. Sarkar 1971–1972, no. 84.
Taji—Originally seven copper plates (of which plates 2 and 4 are lost), found in Ponorogo, East Java, Old Javanese, 823 Śaka = 901CE. Sarkar 1971–1972, no. 71.
Turyan—Stone stele, East Java, Old Javanese, 851 Śaka = 929CE. De Casparis 1988:43–51; Titi Surti Nastiti 2003:144–9.
Waharu II—Set of eight copper plates, East Java, Old Javanese, 851 Śaka = 929CE. Holle 1882:538–44; Brandes 1913, no. XLII.
Waharu IV—Set of at least six copper plates, East Java, Old Javanese, 853 Śaka = 931CE. Boechari 1985–1986:59–65; Titi Surti Nastiti 2003:138–43.
Wangbang Bahen—One copper plate, Central Java, Old Javanese, 846 Śaka = 924CE. Cohen Stuart 1875, KO XVIII; Sarkar 1971–1972, no. 91.
Wanua Tengah III—Set of two copper plates, Central Java, Old Javanese, 830 Śaka = 908CE. Boechari 2012c:484–91. A translation published in Griffiths 2021–2022:198–208.
Watu Kura I—Set of at least seven copper plates, Central Java, Old Javanese, 824 Śaka = 902CE. Brandes 1913, no. XXIV; Sarkar 1971–1972, no. 63; Van Naerssen 1977:58–61.
Watu Ridang—One copper plate, Central Java, Old Javanese, 832 Śaka = 910CE. Unpublished.
Wuatan Tija—Two copper plates, Central Java, Old Javanese, 802 Śaka = 880CE. Stutterheim 1925:171–3; Bosch 1926; Sarkar 1971–1972, no. 46.
Wulakan—Two copper plates, Central Java (?), Old Javanese, 849 Śaka = 928CE. Goris 1928:66–9; Sarkar 1971–1972, no. 94.
Wulig—Stone stele, East Java, Old Javanese, 856 Śaka = 935CE. Brandes 1913, no. XLIV.
Wurare—Cushion of a stone Akṣobhya statue, East Java, Sanskrit, 1211 Śaka = 1289CE. Poerbatjaraka 1922.
Wurudu Kidul—One copper plate, Central Java, Old Javanese, 844 Śaka = 922CE. Stutterheim 1935:444–56; Boechari 1985–1986:120–2.
Wwahan—Stone stele, East Java, Old Javanese, 907 Śaka = 985CE. Unpublished.
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