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nese Pasisir literature, both eastwards and westwards, started from East Java. Minor expansions of Javanese Pasisir culture took their course from Bantën and from Central Javanese maritime towns. The districts affected by them, Lampu^ in South Sumatra by Bantën, and Banjar Masin in Borneo by Central Java, did not produce Javanese literary texts of any importance, however. In Javanese Pasisir literature, the influ ence of Islamic culture was strong. Islam first reached Java by the intermediary of Malay literature, Malay being the medium of the interinsular commerce which brought Muslim traders from India to the Archipe lago. As a result, Pasisir literature contains borrowings from Malay and from Arabic, the sacred language of Islam, but also from other continental languages, in the first place Persian, which was the universal Islamic medium in India in the fifteenth and six teenth centuries. D. The fourth era of the chronological scheme is the period of the renaissance of classical Javanese literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Literature be longing to era D was written in the Sura karta and Yogyakarta idioms, registered in 00030 as group 5. The cultural centre was the Court of the inland Central Javanese Kings in Kartasura, Surakarta and Yogya karta. The fame of the Surakarta authors, called pujav,gas, spread all over Java, and their style was much imitated. In consequen ce in the nineteenth century Surakarta renaissance literature was considered as the Javanese literature par excellence, and works of authors belonging to the preceding Pasisir era fell into oblivion or were disregarded. The Surakarta Court idiom with its rigid

rules of class distinction in vocabulary (the so-called manners of speech, krama and t)oko etc.) was accepted almost everywhere as exemplary. Probably in the seventeenth and the be ginning of the eighteenth century Pasisir literature was already on the decline in conse quence of economic and political retrogres sion in the mercantile towns on the North Coast where the authors and their patrons lived. One by one the maritime districts were vanquished by the forces of the des potic Kings of inland Mataram. Their over sea trade, the source of their prosperity, receded as a result of the rise of Batavia. The Central Javanese renaissance culture of the nineteenth century was the successor of seventeenth and eighteenth century Pasisir civilization, which in its time formed a cul tural link between maritime districts along the coasts of Java, Madura, Bali and Lom bok. The differences between the two are geographical and ideological. Geographically, seventeenth and eighteenth century Javanese Pasisir culture was interinsular. But then it was mainly confined to the maritime districts of the islands. It was not in all respects unified, using different languages and idioms. Nineteenth century Central Ja vanese pujaw>ga culture, on the other hand, was national Javanese. Belonging to the interior of the country, and using the man nered Court idiom of Surakarta and Yogya karta, it was unified to a high degree. Ideologically the difference between Pasi sir and pujav,ga literature consists in their origin and development. In the Pasisir liter ature of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen tury, on the one hand, the principal concern was religion. It superseded the culture of the