Place · Majapahit imperial capital · Indonesia
Trowulan
Also known as Trowulan — Majapahit
The excavated capital of Majapahit, the Javanese empire that dominated the archipelago in the fourteenth century — a city of brick temples, reservoirs and canals whose court literature in Old Javanese was steeped in Sanskrit, and whose Nagarakretagama lists tributaries from Sumatra to New Guinea.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- -7.550, 112.380
Worth knowing
Majapahit's state religion combined Shaiva and Buddhist cults under one royal umbrella, with dead kings deified as Shiva or as Buddha. Its emblem, a Garuda, is the national symbol of Indonesia, and the state motto is an Old Javanese line from a fourteenth-century poem about religious difference.
Connections (3)
- AnalogueHampi / Vijayanagara
Majapahit in Java and Vijayanagara on the Tungabhadra are contemporaries of comparable ambition, and both organised themselves around an Indic theory of universal kingship while governing populations that had no particular interest in it. Majapahit's Nagarakretagama and Vijayanagara's court literature make similar claims to a world empire; both states are known far better from their literature and their ruins than from any administrative record.
- Power passed toPalembang / Srivijaya
Majapahit in east Java displaced Srivijaya as the dominant power of the archipelago in the fourteenth century, and the Nagarakretagama lists tributaries from Sumatra to New Guinea — including the Palembang region that Srivijaya had run for six hundred years. The shift is from a straits-controlling port polity to an agrarian Javanese empire with a fleet, and it moved the centre of the archipelago's politics from Sumatra to Java, where it has stayed.
- Power passed toSingapore
The Malay Annals make Singapura a foundation of a Palembang prince and its fall the work of Majapahit, after which the survivors founded Malacca — which is the Malay account of the fourteenth-century shift of power from the straits to Java and then back again. Archaeology on the Singapore River confirms a real trading town of that date, with Chinese ceramics and glass, destroyed or abandoned about when the chronicle says.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Trowulan”. George Coedès, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia; Hermann Kulke et al., Nagapattinam to Suvarnadwipa.
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