ii

To execute my task I needed a place, but since there was not even a room for the keeper of MSS himself; I was given a desk in the stacks, after all I had to be close to the MSS, but where I was somewhat troubled by the dust. Then I was offered a desk by the window of the reading room by an assistant (the post of keeper of Oriental MSS was vacant after Drs Van Koningsveld left to take a post at the Faculty of Theology). I was advised to compile a practical catalogue in the shortest possible time. Probably the board of advisors had in mind a catalogue in the form of a Handlist of Arabic Manuscripts by Dr P. Voorhoeve or the Katalogus Koleksi Naslcah Melayu Museum Pusat De. P. dan K. (Catalogue of the Collection of Malay Manuscripts at the Central Museum, Dept, of Education and Culture). To save time, it was decided that the descriptions of MSS already contained in the catalogues by H.H. Juynboll and Ph.S. van Ronkel should not be scrutinized any further, but it would be enough to abbreviate them. This is what I did, beginning with MSS already described by Juynboll. But when I came across MSS of Syair Mekah Madinah (Cod.Or. 3335, 3336, 3337, 3338), I stumbled up against problems. While the texts of three MSS (Cod.Or. 3335, 3336, 3337) all have about the same length, ranging from 31 to 42 ff, the text of 3338 is much longer (65 ff). When I compared the text of the three previously mentioned MSS with that of Cod.Or. 6077, I discovered that the text of what is called Syair Mekah Madinah, consists of two different syairs, Syair Mekah Madinah and Syair Sunur. Syair Sunur had been published by Arnold Snackey (1888). In Cod.Or. 6077, the text of which consists of eleven titles, Syair Sunur (no.8) is separated from Syair Mekah Madinah (no. 11) by two other titles. So the text of Cod.Or. 3335, 3336, and 3336 consists of two titles: Syair Mekah Madinah and Syair Sunur, both written by Syaikh Daud Sunur respectively in Mecca and Teurumon (Aceh). The text in Cod.Or. 3338, identified by Juynboll as Syair Mekah Madinah, is not followed by Syair Sunur or any other story, and yet it covers 65 ff. Suspecting that this was yet another syair, I took a closer look. In the colophon there is already mention of the fact that the author is Syaikh Abdul-Wahab al-Khalidi who wrote in Mecca in 1296/1878. The title is also different; this text is called Syair Mekah al-Musyarrafah. In Syair Mekah Madinah the port of departure for the pilgrimage to Mecca is Aceh and the first port of call Ceylon, while in Syair Mekah al-Musyarrafah the port of departure is Singapore, the first port of call Pulau Pinang after which the ship sailed along the coast of India. Juynboll was probably mislead by the beginning of the works, which is similar in all the MSS mentioned above. From that time on I was cautious in relying solely on existing catalogues. When using Van Ronkel s descriptions I ran up against more problems. In the first place I found out that Van Ronkel in general only mentions the beginning and the end of a MS, without touching on the content of it. If the content is described, it is mostly insufficient or incomplete, referring to his catalogue of Jakarta MSS (1899). No doubt Van Ronkel had produced an excellent catalogue of Malay MSS at the Batavian Society in Jakarta, but there he had at his disposal Indonesian teachers, who made abstracts of MSS for his catalogue, which still exist