Place · inscribed copperplate · Philippines
The Laguna Copperplate Inscription
A thin sheet of copper dredged out of the Lumbang river near Laguna de Bay in 1989, and the oldest document written in the Philippines: dated to the year 822 of the Saka era, which is 900 CE. It records the discharge of a debt in gold, and it is written in Old Malay with Sanskrit, Old Javanese and Tagalog words, in the Kawi script — which descends from the Pallava Brahmi carried east from South India. It pushed Philippine written history back six centuries at a stroke.
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 14.300, 121.400 (approximate)
Worth knowing
The document is a receipt. The oldest text in the Philippines is a piece of financial paperwork clearing one family of a debt, dated by an Indian calendar and written in an Indian-derived script.
Connections (2)
- TransmissionMahabalipuram
The Laguna copperplate is written in Kawi, and Kawi descends from the Pallava form of Brahmi — the script cut on the monuments at Mahabalipuram in the seventh century. That letterform travelled east with traders, Brahmins and monks and became the parent of most of the writing systems of Southeast Asia: Kawi in Java and the Philippines, and behind them Khmer, Mon, Burmese, Thai, Lao, Balinese and Javanese. The oldest document in the Philippines is therefore written in a descendant of a South Indian dynasty's inscriptional hand.
- Route adjacencyPalembang / Srivijaya
The Laguna plate is a Srivijayan document in everything but findspot. It is written in Old Malay with Sanskrit, Old Javanese and Tagalog terms, in the Kawi script, and dated by the Saka era — the whole apparatus of the Srivijayan and Javanese commercial world, which reached the Philippine islands as its northern edge. Palembang was that world's centre, where Yijing stopped to study Sanskrit for years before going on to India. The plate shows the network's paperwork conventions being used a thousand kilometres past its core.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Laguna Copperplate Inscription”. Antoon Postma, “The Laguna Copper-Plate Inscription: Text and Commentary”, Philippine Studies 40 (1992); National Museum of the Philippines records.
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