Minor Inscriptions from Kawali, West Java

In this post I briefly introduce the Sundanese archaeological site/park of Astana Gedé in Kawali, West Java, and I take a quick look at three of the shorter inscriptions from the site. In later posts I hope to look at each of the longer inscriptions in turn.

Astana Gedé is a small archaeological park around a kilometre outside the centre of Kawali, a town in Ciamis, West Java, Indonesia (Figure 1). Said to be the capital of the medieval Sundanese dominion of Galuh, Kawali/Astana Gedé is home to some of the most important physical remnants of pre-Islamic and early Islamic Sundanese civilisation. Six Old Sundanese stone inscriptions have been found there, most of them quite short, and the remains of a number of residences presumed to have been palaces for royalty or nobility have been uncovered by archaeologists. A stone-lined bathing place can also be found a little outside the main site and, significantly, a section of the archaeological park contains several early Islamic graves — reportedly the tombs of proselytisers sent to Kawali by the Sultan of Cirebon.

Fig. 1 — The location of Kawali in the kabupaten of Ciamis (lit. ‘Sweet Water’).

Astana Gedé is accessible by road; the entrance is at the edge of a forest inside of which all the inscriptions and other features can be found (Figure 2). It took about forty minutes to get there by car from Tasikmalaya when I visited in November 2018, and if I remember correctly the entrance fee was something like 2000 Rp (about €0.12). It’s not a busy place and international tourists don’t seem to visit very often, but it’s within easy reach of the larger towns of Ciamis and Garut and the region’s scenery is pretty spectacular (as is the local food).

Fig. 2 — The location of Astana Gedé in Kawali, courtesy of Google Maps.

The forest at Astana Gedé is far from overgrown — in fact the site is pretty well-maintained, as you may be able to see in Figure 3. The inscriptions are surrounded by low protective fences, and signs bearing Roman transliterations have been hung beside the longer texts. The more prominent trees have little metal signs on them telling you their Sundanese and Indonesian names as well as their Latin binomials, and some lovely decorative plants can be found growing there — both green and red varieties of handong (Cordyline fruticosa), for instance, and some impressive stands of bamboo. When I visited I got to see some cool wildlife too, including beautiful butterflies and geckos and luckily not including macaques. A cute spider of the species Argiope reinwardti (I think) was guarding the ruins of one of the noble houses.

Fig. 3 — The path leading to the bathing place. Author’s photograph, November 2018.

All-in-all it’s a lovely place. The site has been the subject of some feasible but hopelessly unverifiable folkloric hypotheses about its functions and the meanings of the stone inscriptions. The stones are undated and don’t give us a great deal of other contextual information so anything much said about them is bound to be conjecture. The literature on Kawali/Astana Gedé isn’t too extensive either, and all of the recent stuff is in local languages (see in particular Djafar 1995, Herlina 2017, and Sukardja 2002). It is generally agreed that the inscriptions date to the late fourteenth century CE, anyway, although it’s hard to be certain about that. Astana Gedé is a modern name; in the longer inscriptions the place is clearly referred to as Kawali, just like the modern town.

The Three Short Inscriptions

Six inscriptions have been found at Kawali, all in the Old Sundanese language and all using the same script. They are conventionally numbered I-VI in Roman numerals, although different scholars have applied different numberings to the stones in the past. Here I’m following the order in Herlina (2017). Three of the texts (I, II, and VI) are quite long and descriptive, and they deserve posts of their own. The three inscriptions I’m going to look at in this post are the shorter ones: III, IV, and V. Two of these stones seem to be linggas (Sanskrit: liṅga) — aniconic or phallic representations of the god Śiva (‘Shiva’, Old Sundanese: Siwa) — if we take their words literally (see below). The third inscription contains only one word, but the carved hand- and footprints that are also present on the stone are interesting and can be found at other early Sundanese sites, where they are often associated with gods or kings (as also in some early Indian inscriptions).

The texts of these three inscriptions are, as I say, rather short, and do not amount to complete sentences. They seem to be labels. Only five morphemes are used in the three texts, and I have gone over four of them individually in a separate section on vocabulary below. There is also a note below on linggas in medieval Sunda. The Old Sundanese spelling I’m using in the transliterations is explained in the post-script of a post from earlier this year. Old Sundanese spelling is generally quite straightforward and I don’t see any particular need to use the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) or other tools that add needless complexity (and, if we’re being frank, benefit only career Indologists).

I have my own photographs of the inscription stones but none of them are as good as the photographs in the Leiden University Library (UBL) collection, which were taken by the Flemish-Dutch actor and opera singer Isidore van Kinsbergen in the 1860s. Like many of his pictures, the ones of the Kawali stones are remarkably clear and still of use to scholars today. (The photos do not appear to have been taken against the backdrop of the jungle in which the stones now stand, so the stones must have been moved at least once in the past.) High-quality digital reproductions of Kinsbergen’s photographs can be freely accessed on the Leiden Digital Collections site, and Leiden University seems to be quite happy for people to use them for scholarly purposes. I’ll therefore be making use of Kinsbergen’s shots here instead of mine (Figures 4–7):

1. Prasasti Kawali III

Fig. 4 — Isidore van Kinsbergen’s photograph of the Kawali III inscription. Leiden, UBL, P-023948

TEXT

sanghiyang ling-
ga h(i)yang

TRANSLATION

‘The Holy Lingga of God/an Ancestor/the Ancestors’

2. Prasasti Kawali IV

Fig. 5 — Van Kinsbergen’s photo of the Kawali IV inscription. Leiden, UBL, P-023947.

TEXT

sanghiyang lingga
bingba

TRANSLATION

‘The Holy Lingga of the Image/Orb’ (?)

3. Prasasti Kawali V

Fig. 6 — Van Kinsbergen’s photograph of the Kawali V inscription. Leiden, UBL, P-044010.

Fig. 7 — Detail from Leiden, UBL, KITLV 87615, a zoomable digital version of Kinsbergen’s photograph of Kawali V.

TEXT

añana

TRANSLATION

‘Knowledge’ (?)

VOCABULARY

añana (V) — probably Sanskrit jñāna ‘knowledge’, which usually has a prothetic ⟨a⟩ in Old Sundanese (as in the name of the main character in a narrative poem conventionally called The Ascension of Sri Ajnyana [Noorduyn and Teeuw 2006]). If so, the word on the stone would actually be cognate with the English word ‘know’ (through proto-Indo-European *ǵneh₃-). There’s no contextual information in the inscription, though, so who knows what this really means.

bingba (IV) — perhaps derived from Sanskrit bimba ‘sphere, orb, disc (of the moon, sun, etc.)’. This term is also found in Old Javanese (see OJED 243:15, bimba) with the derived meaning ‘shape, appearance, image’. This could mean, therefore, that the lingga is intended to represent someone or something in an abstracted form — perhaps a king or an ancestor (cf. the h(i)yang on the other stone).

hiyang (III, IV) — ‘god, deity, ancestor’ (etc.), cf. Old Javanese hyaṅ (OJED 659:9). In Old Sundanese this is sometimes spelled hyang and sometimes hiyang, and both spellings can be found in the Kawali inscriptions. The word isn’t Sanskrit, in any case: It goes back to proto-Western Malayo-Polynesian *qiaŋ ‘ancestor, deity, divinity’, according to the Austronesian Comparative Dictionary.

sang (III, IV) — an honorific definite article usually attached to the names of monarchs, deities, or hero(in)es. Its anti-honorific counterpart is si, which precedes the names of demons, servants, and so on. Both these terms are Austronesian and have cognates in Malay, Old Javanese, and others. Sang is often combined with the word hiyang above to make sangh(i)yang ‘the sacred’, a formulation common in the titles of books and sometimes applied to individuals and inanimate objects (as in the sanghiyang ngatma ‘sacred soul/atman’ in the Old Sundanese narrative poem Bujangga Manik). In the Kawali inscriptions this honorific formula is applied to the linggas.

Interpretation

What do these texts actually tell us? Not much, of course. They’re very short.

It seems likely that the two stones with the word lingga on them are linggas, but they’re of rather unusual shape for Javan linggas, which are typically rounder and more obviously phallic (Figure 8). The earliest linggas in West Java, found at early/mid-first millennium CE candis like Batujaya on the coast at Karawang, are also ‘standard’ forms made up of rounded cylinder shapes on octagonal bases. The much later Kawali linggas seem rather rough-hewn — little more than pointy rocks. While there is certainly variation in the forms of linggas across the ancient Indosphere, and while natural rock formations are occasionally treated as linggas in India, there is therefore a clear divide in Java between the later medieval Javanese and Sundanese forms.

Fig. 8 — A Majapahit-era lingga/yoni at the Museum Trowulan in Trowulan, East Java. Photograph by Anandajoti Bhikkhu.

Some other stones at Kawali, and at the enigmatic nearby site of Karang Kamulyan (for which see Munandar 2017:67–102), also appear to be linggas, including the one in Figure 9. These are likewise rather roughly shaped and we might not be able to identify them as linggas if not for the presence of the characteristically Sundanese triangular yoni beside them (also rather odd when compared with yonis from elsewhere in Java):

Fig. 9— A lingga at Kawali. Underneath the rock at the front is supposed to be a yoni, an aniconic representation of the goddess Śakti, a common counterpart to the liṅga and often considered a ‘feminine’ balace to the ‘masculine’ energy of the lingga. In Sunda yonis appear to have taken the form of carved triangles. In other photographs from Kawali the triangular hole is visible (Herlina 2017:18); it was concealed when I was there, apparently deliberately. Author’s photograph, November 2018.

It wouldn’t be good scholarship to say that any standing stone in an early Sundanese context is a lingga, but many of them certainly seem to be. What I find interesting about this is that the erection of standing stones is or was common across the Austronesian-speaking world, from Taiwan through Nias and Flores and beyond (Figure 10; see also Forth [2001:52–61] for a fascinating ethnographic description of a living tradition of standing stones). Indeed, it was once asserted that Indonesian standing stones were part of a global ‘Megalithic’ tradition (Perry 1918), a claim now considered extremely dubious.

Fig. 10— A couple of standing stones in Taidong City (臺東), Taiwan, probably raised by Puyuma people, speakers of an Austronesian language local to the area. Author’s photograph, August 2009.

At the risk of over-interpreting these things, I would suggest that the peculiar forms of these Sundanese linggas resulted from the collision of an Austronesian tradition with a Hindu one: Existing traditions of raising standing stones were re-analysed as Śaivist religious practices in the interior of West Java at some point in the Middle Ages. It seems to me to be a case of the ‘indigenisation’ of an Indian religious tradition, something hardly unprecedented in the history of the Indo-Malaysian archipelago.

The hand- and footprint carvings in Prasasti Kawali V I will look at another time; these are more clearly Indian practices, although in medieval Java they appear to have largely been confined to the Sundanese-speaking west.

I hope to be looking more at medieval Sundanese remains and inscriptions in the near future, in any case. It’s nice to take a trip to Java even if only mentally while stuck inside during the pandemic.

A. J. West — Leiden, April 2020.

REFERENCES

Djafar, Hasan. 1995. Prasasti Kawali. Depok.

Forth, Gregory. 2001. Dualism and hierarchy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Herlina, Nina. 2017. Situs Astana Gede Kawali. Bandung: Universitas Padjadjaran.

Munandar, Agus Aris. 2017. Siliwangi, sejarah, dan budaya Sunda kuna. Jagakarsa: Wedatama Widyasastra.

Noorduyn, J., and Teeuw, A. 2006. Three Old Sundanese poems. Leiden: KITLV.

Perry, W. J. 1918. The megalithic culture of Indonesia. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Sukardja, H. Djadja. 2002. Astana Gede Kawali. II. Ciamis: Kandepdikbud Kabupaten Ciamis.

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