A Few More Javanese Dates
The other day I posted a short piece on dates in Javanese inscriptions, and I mentioned that the main problem in dating Javanese texts isn’t the complexity of the dating system itself. Rather, the numerals themselves can be difficult to read simply because the shapes vary so much between inscriptions. In this post I’m going to show some dates from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century CE inscriptions (thirteenth-to-fifteenth-century Śaka) in chronological order, and hopefully after looking through these examples you’ll be better able to appreciate the difficulties palaeographers face in reading medieval inscriptions from Java.
All the dates are in Śaka years so, as before, just add 78 to the number to get the year in the Common/Christian Era. I’m not going to add a lot of commentary here.
Figure 1. An East Javanese Copperplate

Figure 1 comes from a copperplate inscription with a date of 1245 Śaka (=1323 CE). Thomas Aquinas was canonized in the same year. The script is a classic East Javanese copperplate style, complete with decorative indents in what would otherwise be straight lines.
Figure 2. A Fourteenth-Century Yoni

This inscription is on a large yoni — a Śaivist vagina symbol (sort of). The stylized numerals are still reasonably easy to read, on comparative grounds, as 1294 Śaka (=1372 CE).
Figure 3. A Statue of Brahma

Brahma is one of the supreme gods in the trimūrti (alongside Śiva and Viṣṇu), a ‘trinity’ of gods found in some branches of Hinduism. He can be identified by his four heads — you can only see three in this image as the fourth faces backwards. The date on the base may be unrelated to the statue, of course, but it says 1303 Śaka (=1381 CE). As you can see, the ‘0’ is more or less identical to a modern zero.
Figure 4. A Date on a Slab

This slab carries a simply carved and entirely legible date of 1322 Śaka (=1400 CE).
Figure 5. A Date from Sukuh, Central Java

In the script used at Sukuh and Ceto in Central Java, the ‘3’ appears as a blob with a tail, contrasting with the neatly ‘M’-shaped bits of other ‘3’s. Several dates are known from Sukuh; this one reads 1363 Śaka (=1441 CE). King’s College, Cambridge, was founded in the same year.
Figure 6. A Dated Slab

This slab from East Java carries a date of 1377 Śaka (=1455 CE). In the same year, Gutenberg printed the first Bible with movable type. The ‘7’ here looks particularly good, and is more or less in line with standardized depictions of the numeral derived from early palaeographers’ tables of variants. Note how different the following ‘7’ looks, however:
Figure 7. Inscription from Ceto

Ceto, like Sukuh, is a mid-to-late-fifteenth-century site on the slopes of Mount Lawu on the border of East and Central Java. This is one of several dates known from inscriptions at the complex, and it gives a date of 1378 Śaka (=1456 CE), a year in which Halley’s Comet made an appearance.
Figure 8. A Dated Cylinder

The complete inscription on this cylinder apparently reads ‘1382’, but in this photo you can only see the first two digits: 13. If you’ve examined the previous examples closely then you may have been able to read the numbers without looking at the caption. ‘1’ often looks like a capital ‘M’; ‘3’ is like an ‘M’ with an upward kick at the end. 1382 Śaka, in any case, is 1460 CE.
Figure 9. Another from Ceto

Here the ‘0’ is just a big dot, and the other numerals are a little crude, but it’s possible to read the date 1390 Śaka (=1468 CE). Skanderbeg, the Albanian national hero, died in this year.
Figure 10. Another Date from Ceto

This date from Candi Ceto reads 1394 Śaka (=1472 CE), making it one of the last dated texts from the pre-Islamic period in Central or East Java. In this year snowball fights were banned in Amsterdam and the neo-Confucian scholar Wáng Yángmíng was born in Zhèjiāng province.
All of these dates were inscribed within a ~150-year window, and yet the styles they represent are different enough to present problems of interpretation. That’s quite normal for Indonesian palaeography.
It should be noted that Southeast Asia was, as an early recipient of cultural and scientific influence from India, one of the first places in the world to make extensive use of base-ten positional notation, or so-called ‘Arabic’ numerals. One of the earliest identified uses of the numeral ‘0’ (zero) in the region is in a Cambodian inscription of 605 Śaka (=683 CE). While I’ve focused here on the later Middle Ages, Indonesian peoples also used these numerals from an early period, and it is notable that other medieval Javanese chronological tools — like candrasengkala chronograms — still ultimately depended on the same base-ten system we use today. Śaka dates were used as frequently in the early Middle Ages as in the fifteenth century, and I chose the dates here because they’re closer to my interests, not because they’re the only or even the most prominent examples.
