Spices in a 14th-Century Javanese Inscription
This piece appeared on my Patreon account way back in 2022. I thought I’d move it here so that it would be more accessible. I gave a talk on this topic at a one-day conference at the EFEO in Paris in 2023.
I’ve written a lot about Indonesian spices appearing in texts written elsewhere in Afro-Eurasia, but I’ve seldom discussed appearances of spices in texts from the archipelago itself. This is in part because there aren’t so many mentions of foreign spices in Old Javanese texts — by far the largest medieval Southeast Asian corpus. Indeed, the main thing I’ve written about spices in Old Javanese is a post pointing out just how infrequently cloves appear in early Javanese texts.
Still, there are a few interesting references to spices in Old Javanese. Perhaps the most intriguing of these can be found in a copperplate inscription from Biluluk (modern Bluluk), East Java, which bears a date equivalent to 1391 AD/CE. The inscription is one of three from Bluluk, dated 1366, 1391, and 1395, concerning duties on certain commodities and tax exemptions for people working in certain professions.
Four spices appear in the second line of the verso of the 1391 Biluluk II inscription. Here is the text of this line from the transliteration in Theodoor Pigeaud’s Java in the 14th Century (1960:I:116):
luput iṅ titiban sahaṅ, cabe, kumukus, kapulaga, wsi, kawali wsi, piṅgan, pañjālin, kapas […]
‘… free from the titiban tax: black pepper, long pepper, cubeb, cardamom, iron, iron pans, porcelain, rattan, (and) cotton…’
In this post I’d like to go through the spices mentioned in the inscription one-by-one (Figure 1). It has been suggested that these were foreign spices imported into Java; Kenneth Hall, for instance, claims that these were ‘all trade goods acquired from other places in exchange for local products’ (1985:239). I’d say, though, that unlike the porcelain and iron mentioned in the same line, all four of the spices in the inscription actually came from Java itself.
I don’t know what this tells us about the titiban tax, which Hall translates as ‘what drops in the lap’ (from tiba ‘to fall’); I am not in any sense a specialist on medieval Javanese taxation. It is interesting to see these spices in a local Javanese context nevertheless, and it seems worthwhile to examine the spices in more detail here, particularly as this line in the Biluluk II copperplate appears to be the only direct textual attestation of the growing and harvesting of these spices in Java in Old Javanese.
Sahaṅ
Sahaṅ, the first item on the list, probably means ‘(black) pepper’ (Piper nigrum). In Zoetmulder’s Old Javanese-English Dictionary (1982) the only reference to sahaṅ per se is in this inscription (OJED 1596:5), but the word is also found found in Malay (sahang) with the meaning ‘pepper’, and a derived Old Javanese form, asahaṅ ‘biting, sharp’, is found in a number of other texts. We can be quite sure of the interpretation here, I think.
Some scholars doubt that Java produced black pepper in the Middle Ages. There is some support for this position: Jordanus the Catalan, who served as Latin Christian Bishop of Kollam (aka Quilon) in South India in the fourteenth century, says of Java:
Ibi nasciuntur cubebæ et nuces muscatæ, atque mazarus, et aliæ species nobilissimæ omnes, excepto pipere (Jordanus Catalani 1839:51).
‘There are grown cubebs, nutmeg, and mace, and all the other kinds of most noble spices, except pepper.’
(Unfortunately the only surviving manuscript of Jordanus’s Mirabilia Descripta — London, British Library, Additional MS 19513, which was written in around 1330 — has yet to be digitised, so I’m forced to rely here on an old edition.)
It should be clear that this is a minority opinion among foreign accounts, however, and both medieval Chinese and early modern Portuguese texts mention black pepper specifically as a Javanese export (as does Marco Polo). Zhào Rǔkuò says that the country of Shépó (闍婆國, i.e. Java — Middle Chinese: dzyae-ba [Kroll 2017:92, 348]) produced ‘black pepper’ (胡椒 hújiāo), and Portuguese descriptions of Java mention both black pepper (pimenta) and long pepper (pimenta longa) as Javanese export commodities.
Cabe
As I noted in an earlier post on here, Pigeaud translated cabe, the next item in the list, as ‘capsicum’, the New World pepper genus. In modern Malay/Indonesian the word does indeed refer to chilis. Unfortunately for this interpretation, there were no American peppers (chilis, bell peppers, or others) in island Southeast Asia in the fourteenth century, and this cabe is instead Piper retrofractum, a type of long pepper popularly known as ‘Java pepper’ or, in Indonesian and Javanese, cabai/cabe Jawa. This spice is native to Java, as the name suggests.
P. retrofractum is a plant in the pepper genus (Piper), which is incidentally native to Southeast Asia, so it’s related to black pepper (P. nigrum) and Indian long pepper (P. longum) as well as cubeb (P. cubeba), the next item. The dried berries are much longer than they are wide and they have an additional warm quality, a sort of allspicey-ness, that black pepper doesn’t have. In early sixteenth-century Portuguese descriptions of Java, P. retrofractum appears under the name pimenta longa (‘long pepper’) as one of the island’s chief exports.
Kumukus
This is the cubeb (Piper cubeba), a plant endemic to Java that was frequently exported to the rest of the world for use as both food and medicine. (In a post on the old blog I looked at cubebs in thirteenth-century Denmark.) The dried berries are a little larger and rounder than black peppercorns and taste peppery, as you’d expect of a plant in the genus Piper — but there’s a faint citrusy sourness in there as well. The Old Javanese name, kumukus, is from kukus ‘smoke, cloud’, perhaps because the seeds were smoked to prevent their germinating after export or perhaps because of the fiery flavour of cubebs themselves. Kumukus is the source of the modern Malay/Indonesian and Javanese words for ‘cubeb’ (both kemukus).
The Portuguese apothecary Tomé Pires, writing 1513–15, said that cubebs could only be procured in Java (Pires 2018:202):
tem cubebas atee vimte [ou] trimta bahares cad’ano, e nom nas há em outra parte.
‘[Java] has cubebs, up to twenty or thirty bahars a year, and there are none of them in any other parts.’
Cubebs probably did grow on a few other Indonesian islands as well, and there is a suggestion in some Arabic texts that cubebs were being grown in southern China by some point in the late Middle Ages — but Java was certainly the principal exporter (and not an importer) of cubebs when the Biluluk copperplates were inscribed.
Kapulaga
Finally: Kapulaga is the word for ‘cardamom’ in both modern and Old Javanese, and its name is almost identical in Malay/Indonesian as well (kepulaga). Cardamom is famously associated with South India, but the species referred to here is almost certainly not the South Indian green cardamom (Elettaria cardamomum). It is instead the Javanese cardamom, Amomum compactum, a plant in a different genus but bearing seeds with similar properties in terms of size and flavour. In Malay/Indonesian and other languages of the archipelago, this spice is known as kepulaga jawa ‘Javanese cardamom’, and it was undoubtedly grown and harvested in Java itself in the fourteenth century.
Now, some of the other products in the list do appear to have been imported. Porcelain was not manufactured in Java, and even the word for it in the inscription, piṅgan, came from a foreign language, specifically Tamil (from பீங்கான் pīngkāṉ ‘porcelain, chinaware, a plate’ (Fabricius 1972:271). Java is poor in iron; the vast majority of raw iron and iron pots and pans in medieval Java were imported from China and Sulawesi (an island with rich iron deposits, particularly around Lake Matano). These things are frequently found at excavated shipwreck sites in Southeast Asian waters and it is evident from many sources that they were in high demand in Java throughout the Middle Ages.
It seems to me, though, that the black pepper, long pepper, cubeb, cardamom, rattan, and cotton in this inscription would have been grown locally, and that there was little reason for Javanese merchants to buy such things from foreign traders. As I said above, this is perhaps the only direct attestation of these things in Old Javanese, and I’d suggest that this makes the Biluluk II copperplate a more important document than it might seem at first sight.
Alex West — Leiden, 2022 (posted here 2024).
References
Fabricius, Johann Philipp. J. P. Fabricius’s Tamil and English dictionary. 4th ed., rev.and enl. Tranquebar: Evangelical Lutheran Mission Pub. House, 1972.
Hall, Kenneth. 1985. Maritime trade and state development in early Southeast Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Jordanus Catalani. 1839. Description des merveilles d’une partie de l’Asie. Recueil de voyages et de mémoires. Book IV. Paris: La Société de Géographie.
Kroll, Paul W. 2017. A student’s dictionary of Classical and medieval Chinese. Leiden: Brill.
Pigeaud, Th. G. Th. 1960–63. Java in the 14th century. Five volumes. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Pires, Tomé. 2018 [1515]. A suma oriental. Rui Manuel Loureiro (ed). Lisbon: Centro Científico e Cultural de Macau.
