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00020 Outline of the Development of Javanese Literature: Four Eras.

The number of Javanese texts containing reliable information on the date when they were first written is very small. In many cases years mentioned in proemiums or colophons refer to the making of the copy, not to the composing of the original text. The number of authors explicitly mentioning their names in their works is also small. In fact only in some periods of the history of Javanese letters was it the custom for authors to do so. The poets of classic Old Javanese epic poems living at the Courts of East Java nese Kings, flourishing from the eleventh to the fourteenth century, used to mention the names of their Royal patrons, together with their own names, in the proemiums or the colophons of their works. Perhaps they hoped for a palpable reward for their labour. The eighteenth and nineteenth cen tury Surakarta authors who developed a renaissance of classical letters probably fol lowed the example of their admired prede cessors in inserting notes on personalia in their works. In a majority of cases the period of the writing of a given Javanese book is a matter of conjecture. Especially small texts are dif ficult to date. The same condition of time lessness and namelessness prevails in the literatures of many other peoples living in the sphere of the Greater Indian civilization. In Java the exactitude on the point of per sonalia and years developed in Arabic litera ture was not taken over except by a few authors of orthodox Islamic religious treati ses. The disregard of exact information on authorship of books is an instance of the relatively superficial influence of Muslim

Arabic literature. As modern students of Javanese literature cannot do without some historical insight into developments, in the present Synopsis the following chronological scheme of four eras is introduced (see also 00150). A. The first era is a pre-Islamic period of about six centuries, beginning about 900 A.D., up to about 1500 A.D., the traditional date of the victory of Islam over pre-Islamic belief in the East Javanese kingdom of Majapahit. Javanese texts indubitably writ ten in the pre-Islamic period have been preserved for posterity mainly in eighteenth and nineteenth century Balinese manus cripts. The idiom is called Old Javanese. In Java the original Javanese tradition of literature was interrupted and all but cut off by the rise of Islam. The books of era A correspond with the first group of Javanese texts (1), mentioned in 00030, which is dis tinguished from subsequent groups on lin guistic grounds. The remnants of pre-Islamic Javanese lite rature are scanty. In some cases it is doubt ful whether a given text was written in Java or in Bali. In the relatively small number of Old Javanese texts a chronological dis tinction can be made between works of authors living in the period of suzerainty of the Kadiri Kings (up to about 1200 A.D.) and their predecessors, on the one side, and books written in the subsequent Siqasari- Majapahit period on the other. Almost all Old Javanese texts were written in East Java, mainly in districts situated in the basin of the river Brantas. The few exceptions are soms very old texts probably written