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represented only a skeleton of the living language as written in India, though, as conjugation and declension were disregarded (see 46250). Since the fifteenth or the sixteenth cen tury the Javanese authors’ knowledge of the rules of Indian prosody has been on the decline. More and more metrical quantity of syllables was neglected. As a result Indian metres were only distinguished one from another by the number of syllables in the lines. Meanwhile for a long time Javanese poets were aware of the existence of prosodic rules referring to metric quantity, though they no longer knew the minor details. In Javanese the expression guru-lagu (Sanskrit: guru-laghu: heavy and light, i.e. metrically long and short) means prosody in general. Whereas during the following centuries Balinese poets continued writing kakawins, in Java the rise of Islam and the development of a modern Muslim Javanese literature were detrimental to the knowledge of Old Javan ese letters. Nevertheless the tradition was never cut off completely. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at the Surakarta Court in Central Java a renaissance of clas sical Old Javanese kakawin literature made its appearance (see 30900). In Surakarta, which maintained relations (by way of the river Bëqawan) with the old North-East Coast centre of culture Grësik, manuscripts originally written by Pasisir scribes became available. Renaissance poets, admirers of Old Javanese kakawins, but unacquainted with the rules of Indian prosody, wrote modernized versions of the old epic poems, using Indian metres as far as known to them, with a complete disregard of metric quan tity. This eighteenth century Central Javan

ese offshoot of the Old Javanese poetical tradition and idiom was called kawi miriv, “sloping poetical idiom”, apparently because the authors were conscious of their defi ciency in writing real kawi. The kawi miriv, literature did not develop vigorously, and in the nineteenth century it fell into oblivion. Quite often in kawi miriv, poems the metres have special names, different from the names of Sanskrit and Old Javanese metres having the same number of syllables in a line. Prob ably the kawi miriv, names were inventions of nineteenth century Javanese scholars. The custom of mentioning the name of the metre, or alluding to it, in the beginning of a new canto, was often practised by authors of kawi miriv, poems. In Old Javanese kakawins it occurs also, though not very frequently. Stanzas of Old Javanese epics, especially the Bharata Yuddha, were used as recitatives in wayat) performances. As such they are called suluks or kawins (see 30920). For a similar use, as texts for choral welcome songs (panembrama) etc., stanzas in a kind of kawi miriv, were written in the late nine teenth century flourishing period of music at the Court of Prince Mai}ku Nagara IV of Surakarta, who was a patron of Raqga Warsita, the last of the pujav,gas (see 31360). Being in the first place poets, more than prosaists, Javanese authors always were in terested inj prosody. In the pre-Islamic period manuals of Indian prosody were made available in Old Javanese versions, and in the nineteenth century several trea tises on the subject were written (see 46250). The renaissance scholars introduced the term tëmbav, gedé, great verse, for metres of the Indian type, in order to distinguish them