Alphabet Key To History Of Mankind

Author(s): David Diringer
Publisher: Hutchinsons Scientific and Technical Publications

Page 423

422
THE ALPHABET ANCIENT JAVA
It is a remarkable fact that whereas the splendid architectura! monuments of ancient Java are found in the central part of the island,
he earliest written documents have been discovered in western Java. They consist of four rock-inscriptions (a fifth, found at Mocara Tianten. is as yet undeciphered), all found in the province of the present capital, Batavia. These inscriptions (Fig. 174, 3) are undated, but on palæographical grounds they are attributed to the fourth or the fifth century A.D. They bear ample testimony to the high degree of civilization of western Java at that period. The inscriptions eulogise # ruler of the name of Purnavarman; they are all composed in Sanskrit verse and prove that the ancient western-Javanese civilization was of Indian origin.
Apparently towards the end of the sixth century A.D), western Java fell into decay and central Java rose into prominence. In the eighth century A.D., two centres of power were emerging in the Malay Archipelago, one in southern Sumatra and the other in central Java. Intermittent wars punctuated the early period of Indonesian national history. The constant struggle for the control of the archipelago was marked by a long series of wars between the Sumatran and Javanese dynasties, and was finally decided in favour of the Javanese. About the middle of the eighth century central Java passed into the hands of the Sri Vijaya rulers of Sumatra but about 863 the Sumatran period of Javanese history came to an end, and the hegemony of Java passed again to central Java.
A thousand years ago a great empire flourished in the East Indies with its centre in Java. The period from about A.D. 850-900 to 1400 marked the height of native civilization, when all the islands and part of the mainland of Asia were gradually brought together in a centralized empire known as Modjopahit or Majapahit. From the capital in eastern Java, it exercised during the fourteenth and most of the fifteenth century supreme dominion over most of the archipelago as far north as Luzon in the Philippines and as far east as the coastland of New Guinea. It was during this period that Hindu-Javanese civilization spread most widely over the entire area, and one of the relics of this influence, in the form of offshoots of ancient Indian scripts, is found in the north, in the scripts of some native Philippine tribes.
At the very height of its power, the Majapahit empire was suddenly threatened by a new force which entered the Indies from the west. Islam brought from India that is, from the same country which was the source of the earliest civilization of the Malay Archipelago-to Malaya and Sumatra in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, spread inevitably over the vassal states of Majapahit in Sumatra and western Java, which one after another broke away. During the fifteenth century the last strongholds of the Majapahit empire in eastern Java were destroyed by the Moslem conquest.
Thus ended the greatest era of Indonesian early native history. The waves of Islam at length engulfed Java; there was no means of keeping it out. "Java has now been a Mohammedan country for nearly five hundred years. It would doubtless have been so far earlier if it had not been so well off the track" (Ponder). Moreover, it would have been nowadays a desert, if "the Mongol conquerors who ravaged half Asia had chanced upon it" (Ponder).
Two places have remained unaffected by the Moslem conquest; the small island of Bali, off the eastern shore of Java, which continued to be the only one