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turies approximately) is called Pasisir (Coast) culture (see 00020, Era C). While being Muslims by religious persuasion, rulers and scholars of Pasisir districts considered them selves as heirs of the mass of pre-Islamic Old Javanese cultural achievements and they cultivated their heritage and developed it in their own way. Districts outside Java, Palém- bang in Sumatra and the island of Lombok, east of Bali, were dominated by Javanese Pasisir culture. Its influence spread further, all along the coasts of Sumatra, the Malay Peninsula and South Borneo. The links con necting all these districts and islands were: a common religion, Islam, a common heri tage, Javanese Pasisir culture, and common economic interests, interinsular trade. In the course of the seventeenth and eigh teenth centuries, Pasisir culture and Java nese interinsular trade declined. The Kings of the inland Mataram district conquered and sacked the Javanese North Coast towns, and the Dutch East India Company mono polized interinsular trade. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the remaining cen tres of culture on a national base, in Madura, the Pasisir districts and West Java (Sunda) were only of local importance. All, however, retained the imprint, in varying degrees, of the interinsular Pasisir culture, which had been the intermediary between old pre-Is- lamic Java and modern times. Under the present head are registered lawbooks and treatises 0-n law partly dating from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the flourishing period of the Pasisir culture in Java. The manuscripts which have come down to us, however, date at the earliest from the eighteenth century. In consequence of the political and social decline of the

centres of Pasisir culture many manuscripts and works of art of the period are lost. Scholars of the Pasisir Courts tried in their way to put some order in the chaotic mass of Old Javanese juridical literature. Lawbooks especially concerned with eccle siastics were left out as being no longer of use in Islamic states. Influence of Muslim religious law, fiqh, is sometimes discernible. Some rulers issued juridical decrees (undai3- undany) which afterwards were incorporated in the codes. Collections of lawsuits and legal opinions of competent lawyers were used as books of reference by judges sitting on the Royal courts of justice. In Part One, Religion, of the present Synopsis (17.000) some moralistic and didac tic books of the Pasisir period, showing a similar development as the lawbooks, have been discussed. Both groups of texts had their origin in pre-Islamic literature. Prob ably the authors of the moralistic treatises and the lawbooks of the Pasisir period be longed to the same group of learned scholars at Court. It seems likely that a distinction is to be made between the worldly Court scholars and the pious Muslim divines who made adaptations of Arabic books on theo logy and law (see 15.700 and 16.200, cf. 48.000). 47.410 Compendiums of jurisprudence of Old Javanese origin: cod. 1832 (Kuntara, Raja Niti, Surya hjalam, Praniti Raja Kapa-kapa, Jugul Muda and Salokatara by sénapati Jimbun), 1846 (Kuntara Raja Niti etc.). 47.420 Jaya Lerjkara lawbook, compendium, connected with Kuntara and Jimbun): cod. 1862, 2125, 6203 a no. 12 and 13, NBS 56.