This text is for questions 14 to 17.

    Three thousand inscriptions from ancient Indonesian communities have been found dating from the fifth through the ninth centuries of the Common Era. The earliest are on stone pillars. In many ancient Indonesian cultures upright stones, troughs of stone, rice-blocks, and chests were erected, some carved with animals and birds. What was new about the Kalimantan pillars was that their surfaces were covered in words, and they resemble devotional pillars erected in Indian kingdoms that were contemporary with Mulavarman. The language boasting of this king's exploits is Sanskrit, the literary language of India; the writing system is modeled on the Pallava script of south India.

    Pillars erected in public places were intended to publicize the royal presence and to awe. They were larger than the men who quarried and dragged them to the space designated. Their texts were hammered and chiseled on to front, back, and sides of the stone surfaces in large, elongated letters. These pillars were the focal point of ceremonies in open spaces; they were the site for gatherings of kings' men to swear oaths. Their contents were fixed in one place; people had to go to the writing. Archipelago kings who wished to communicate in writing with distant officials employed not stonemasons, but metalworkers, men who knew how to heat metal and beat it into thin sheets. To write on such a medium, the scribe needed a fmely pointed tool, not a chisel, and had to squeeze the contents into sheets ten to twenty-five centimeters wide and twenty to twenty-five centimeters long by making the letters small and rounded. Most plates could carry four lines of text only, so, unless the text was very brief, it continued on several plates. These portable plates carried a ruler's specific message to an individual or a village.

    All known inscriptions from Indonesia are issued in the name of kings. The voice of the king is the voice of the one who gives orders. Subjects must obey, they must pay taxes, they must perform specified duties, they must swear oaths binding them to their promises. The other voice on metal and stone is that of the writer. The writer sings praises to the king, compares him to Indian gods. The writer carefully establishes the date of the act of writing according to an Indian system for calculating time.

Adopted from: Jean Gelman Taylor, Indonesia: Peoples and Histories, London, Yale University Press, 2003.

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