Alex West - Why did People in Medieval Java Use So Many Different Scripts?

Medieval Java produced an extraordinary range of different scripts, all of them Brahmic alphasyllabaries. These scripts were used to write several languages, chiefly Sanskrit, Old Javanese, Old Malay, and Old Sundanese, from the fifth century CE on. As few manuscripts have survived from before the sixteenth century, nearly all of these scripts are known from inscriptions in andesite, copper, and bronze, many of them from only one or two texts. These inscriptions give glimpses into what must have been a fascinating and fertile scribal culture: One script is only found on bronze mirror handles; another, consisting of rectangular blocks with indentations, is known from a single thirteenth-century bronze slit-drum. Some scripts, like those from the fifteenth-century temples at Ceto and Sukuh, are monumental and protrude from the surfaces of the stones on which they were written, while others, like that of the Singosari inscription (1351 CE), are thin and elegant, perhaps attempting to replicate the look of manuscripts written with a brush pen. There is comparatively little continuity of form.

I will attempt to explain this variation with reference to the island’s hot and humid environment, which ensured that few palm-leaf manuscripts survived longer than a few decades, and to the Javanese concept of laṅö, or ‘aesthetic experience’. Changes in the forms of graphemes built up over time as copyists were forced to rely on recently produced manuscript exemplars, and such changes were encouraged in any case by a notion of beauty that stressed the peculiar and innovative. These Javan writing systems should perhaps best be seen as artforms in their own right, understood as expressions of a wider emphasis on aesthetic appreciation in elite life. In contrast to earlier scholarship, particularly Casparis’s Indonesian Palaeography (1975), typologies of these scripts should stress their diversity rather than their unity.

The CREWS Project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 677758).