Medieval Indonesia

Long before the arrival of Europeans, the islands of Indonesia were home to powerful kingdoms who fended off Genghis Khan and took a part in global trade routes. Dr. Eleanor Janega is joined by Dr. Alex West to explore the rich and often overlooked history of Medieval Indonesia; a world where Indian, Chinese, and Islamic influences converged to create a vibrant cultural mosaic, where oceanic trade networks brought spices, silk, and stories from the Levant to New Guinea - and how these exchanges shaped one of Southeast Asia’s greatest empires. MORE Genghis Khan to Tamerlane: Mongol Empire Reborn https://open.spotify.com/episode/62GXJOJWKCOHEijcyVLUu8 Gone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega. It was edited by Amy Haddow, the producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds. Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Matt Lewis?

  From long-lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places, to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Yarnagger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on History Hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

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• 1:12Eleanor Janega?

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• 2:23Eleanor Janega?

  Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanor Yanaga, and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes, to the Crusades. We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were, and how we got here.

• 3:00Eleanor Janega?

  Imagine a time long ago when vast kingdoms rose and fell, where the roaring ocean was the lifeblood of empires, where legends were born beneath vaulting temple domes. From the fertile plains of Java to the bustling seas of Sumatra, Indonesia's medieval period, spanning from the 5th to the 15th century, was a time of astounding transformation.

• 3:31Eleanor Janega?

  What we know begins with the earliest stone inscriptions in East Kalimantan, the first whispers of a new world unfolding in 350 C.E. In the shadow of great mountains and along the shores of mighty rivers, the kingdoms of Tarmunagara, Kalinga, and Srivajaya emerged, each carving their own legacy into history. In the bustling harbors of Srivajaya, merchants from across the seas converged, trading silk, spices, and stories. And the first sparks of exchange with the Islamic world began to flicker.

• 4:14Eleanor Janega?

  By the ninth century, towering monuments gave Borobudur and Prambanan their skylines, stone testaments to the creativity, craftsmanship, and spirituality of the Selandra and Sanjaya dynasties, where art, religion, and culture collided.

• 4:33Eleanor Janega?

  And then, from the ashes of war, the Kingdom of Majapahit was welded in the fires of ambition and unity, becoming the jewel of Southeast Asia, a sprawling empire whose influence reached far beyond the shores of Indonesia.

• 4:52Eleanor Janega?

  But it wasn't just the power of kings and warriors that made medieval Indonesia formidable. Cultures, Indian, Chinese, and Islamic, fused and blended together to forge something unique. From the epic tales of the Mahabharata to the grand temple architecture, these ancient traditions continue to echo in the heart of Indonesia today.

• 5:17Eleanor Janega?

  In this episode of Gone Medieval, I'm delighted to be joined by Dr. Alex West. Alex is a lecturer at the Institute for Area Studies at the University of Leiden, specializing in the Indo-Malaysian archipelago in the 15th century, before the arrival of the Portuguese and the Islamization of Sunda. His translations and research have revealed the presence of commodities sourced from places as far apart as the Levant and New Guinea. So join us as we journey back to an age of empires and legends, where the winds of history whispered across vast oceans, and kingdoms rose on the back of dreams.

• 5:59Eleanor Janega?

  Alex, welcome to Gone Medieval. Thank you.

• 6:02Speaker 07

  Having me?

• 6:03Eleanor Janega?

  Oh, it's an absolute delight, although I suppose to a certain extent I've lured you here under a false pretenses because you know, the headline that we tell people is that we're going to talk about medieval Indonesia, but we start off with a problem immediately when we say Indonesia, right? Which is that there's no such thing. That's, that's not real, right? Instead, we have all kinds of much more complex things going on, which is, I suppose, standard. But I think in Indonesia, as we call it now, things are much more complex than the European milieu is at the time. Would you agree with that?

• 6:43Speaker 07

  I don't know if it's more complex. I mean, where do you, how do you define Europe? You know, if you start with that is your question, it's pretty difficult. But yeah, I mean, Indonesia is basically a completely arbitrary country. I mean, it has literally straight lines on the map of the country. The kind of thing that shows you that this is actually just a colonial European empire that got turned into a democratic republic. And it's basically just the Dutch Empire before the Second World War as a country. And that is what it is. So the borders are pretty artificial. And using the term Indonesia, of course fraught with difficulties there. I mean, and there are people who are going to be kind of angry about it as well.

• 7:25Speaker 07

  I mean, personally, I tend to cover things that also include Timor-Leste, Papua New Guinea, to some extent, also Singapore and Malaysia, importantly as well, and Brunei. I mean, there's a lot of different countries in this part of the world. And Indonesia is just kind of a, it's an easy way to point people in the direction of what we're talking about more than anything else, because it is by far the biggest country over there. It's the fourth biggest country in the world by population, behind the US, something like 270 million people living there. Whereas Malaysia only has something like 30, something, but I say only. I mean, 30 million people is still a fairly, fairly big country.

• 8:07Eleanor Janega?

  Only, oh, is that all?

• 8:08Speaker 07

  Something like that, anyway. I've never really looked it up, but I assume it's something like that. So of course, it's completely arbitrary, it's completely artificial. It's also quite useful. So that's why I've gone for that, or at least what we've gone for that.

• 8:21Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, I mean, I suppose that that's the thing, isn't it? We're trying to talk about a huge conglomeration of islands with rather a lot of people in them. And so it's going to be messy to a certain extent. And, you know, I'm comfortable with that. I live in mess, you know, like I'm a Holy Roman Empire person. I'm like, the messier the better. I'm much more comfortable with it when things are a little bit more up in the air, but.

• 8:47Speaker 07

  And in this case, I should say, there is no agreed upon terminology, but there is no one phrase that you can use to refer to the splits. So it kind of doesn't matter that much. You know, people say maritime Southeast Asia. Okay, that usually includes the Philippines as well. Island Southeast Asia, the same thing. And the Philippines is quite separate, for at least my purposes. It really doesn't have very much to do with the other parts of islands Southeast Asia. So Malaysia, Indonesia, and that sort of area, which are a bit more integrated, whereas the Philippines is almost entirely separate. So, um, yeah. And there are a bunch of other expressions.

• 9:26Speaker 07

  There is a local term as well, which is Nusantara. And that's a term that people nowadays use in Indonesia and Malaysia to refer to island Southeast Asia, maritime Southeast Asia. And it's been adopted to such an extent that they've adopted it in Indonesia as the capital, as the new name of the new capital that's just been built on the island of Borneo. So it's literally going to be the name of their capital city from now on. They're moving from Jakarta because Jakarta's sinking, basically. It's one of the biggest cities in the world. It's one of the biggest cities in southern hemisphere, something like 30 million people in and around the city. They're drinking up the water. The water's disappearing from the city itself. So the land's sort of subsiding.

• 10:10Speaker 07

  Great. So anyway, they built this new capital on the island of Borneo. They've called it Nusantara. This is supposed to be the old name for the inter-Malaysian archipelago or for Indonesia, or whatever you want to call it.

• 10:21Speaker 07

  In practice, it probably wasn't that. It's actually an old Javanese term, meaning the other islands. And it seems to have been more of a political designation referring to allies and vassals of the Javanese kingdom.

• 10:34Speaker 07

  And not a geographical designation for the archipelago. But well, we don't really know. Maybe it was.

• 10:41Eleanor Janega?

  Oh, yeah. So which brings me to sort of my first big question then. When we are attempting to extract historical terms from the past, you know, whether it's to name a new capital or just to have a conversation in general. What are we looking at in terms of sources for this area? Because, you know, it can be sort of fraught in the medieval period, certainly in Europe, less to a lesser extent in places like China. But, you know, it's rather a long time ago for doing something like going back to the fifth century. So what evidence do we have to work with if we want names or locations?

• 11:19Speaker 07

  Well, I seem to remember from Christopher Hamel's book on European manuscripts, there's something like a million surviving medieval European manuscripts, something like that. And for Southeast Asia as a whole, we probably have a dozen, like mainland and the islands. The oldest dated manuscript, which I'm aware at least, is from 1334.

• 11:41Eleanor Janega?

  Wow.

• 11:42Speaker 07

  So quite late. I think it's that I haven't checked the date in a while, but I think it's 1334. And even that one, some people are skeptical of, some people doubt that one. From mainland Southeast Asia, I think the oldest one, if I remember from a conference paper from years ago, was from was a some Jatik fragments in the Pali language from 1476.

• 12:02Speaker 07

  So we're dealing with a very small manuscript record, very, very small. And we're dependent for literary texts, for religious things, on much, much later copies of texts from really the 10th century onwards. And most of those copies, in the case of Old Javanese and the Old Javanese language, were copied on the island of Bali, not all of them, there are some that survived in Java as well. So it's a very fragmentary record, it's all over the place, all sorts of strange lines of transmission of information. The sources that we're dealing with, the historical documentation is quite sparse, quite limited. And interpreting the texts themselves is also quite difficult.

• 12:47Speaker 07

  So if you look at translations of Old Javanese texts from 50 years ago, they're completely different from translations that we have now.

• 12:54Eleanor Janega?

  Really? Wow.

• 12:56Speaker 07

  So this is why, you know, this term like "Lusantar" that now we can interpret in a certain way, was interpreted in quite a naive way decades ago. And yeah, that's pretty typical, that's not strange at all. At the same time, people were writing things down in Southeast Asia, probably from the early, mid-first millennium AD.

• 13:18Eleanor Janega?

  Okay.

• 13:19Speaker 07

  We have inscriptions from that period. So the oldest inscriptions in Malay, for example, Malay is like the big language in this part of the world. It's, it forms the basis of the Indonesian language, which is the national language of Indonesia, and also the national language of Malaysia and so on. We have inscriptions in Malay from the 680s. In fact, we have a series of precisely dated inscriptions from the 680s. But then the oldest manuscript in Malay, that we're, of which we're aware, is from the late 14th century.

• 13:47Eleanor Janega?

  So when we're making the differentiation between the transcriptions and the manuscripts, where are we getting these?

• 13:55Speaker 07

  Well, the inscriptions on stone and things like that, and copper plates as well, and also gold, there are some on gold. Although there's a tendency in Indonesia these days to make fakes of gold inscriptions because they seem really cool, that's gold, so you can sell it for quite a high price. I mean, it is cool, absolutely.

• 14:13Eleanor Janega?

  It is cool, like, I mean, fair enough.

• 14:16Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And there are some on tin, I think, and there are some on bamboo. I mean, that's really a sort of manuscript in a way. Yeah, all sorts of different kinds of texts of different ages. But the inscriptions are always on non-organic materials, always so much older than the manuscripts that we have. So there's a real disconnect between these kinds of things, between literature and official indicts and tax registers and all that kind of stuff that we have written in stone.

• 14:47Eleanor Janega?

  Well, we love it when something's written in stone, don't we? Historians are just salivating, we're like, yes, great, put it down, it's gonna work out. But because, but you've you've kind of hinted at something, because one of the problems, as I understand it from your work, is that we lack things, like a lot of manuscripts from this period, because turns out if you write things down on organic material and store it in the tropics, it rots, right?

• 15:13Speaker 07

  Yep, yep, that's basically the issue. You know, in Java, it's about six degrees south of the equator, something like that. So this is really, Indonesia is really an equatorial country. It's really straddles the equator, so it's, you know, really a few degrees north and south. And yeah, you get year-round heat and in most areas, year-round humidity as well. In higher altitude areas, so there are quite a lot of mountains in Indonesia, it's full of volcanoes. And if you go up those volcanoes or up those mountains, then yeah, you can get a bit of relief from the heat and also from the humidity. But, you know, we don't have so many of these sort of scriptoria or archives surviving.

• 15:57Speaker 07

  They were built, we know that there were such things, and they were called Kabul Yudan in Old Javanese and Old Sundanese, which is the language of West Java.

• 16:07Speaker 07

  But yeah, we just don't have very many things surviving from them. And a lot of the ones that we do have are in kind of a fragile state, or they're owned by just ordinary people. The oldest surviving Malay manuscript is written on paper mulberry bark sheets, so it's the sheets of bark.

• 16:25Speaker 07

  And it's from, as I said earlier, it's from the late 14th century, maybe as late as 1420. It's been radiocarbon dated.

• 16:33Speaker 07

  And and that's from Sumatra, from the island of Sumatra, from a region called Karinji. And that's just kept in somebody's house. People just own it. It's theirs.

• 16:42Eleanor Janega?

  I love that for them. Yeah, that's that's kind of the dream, isn't it? You know?

• 16:47Speaker 07

  The the guy who dated, who had it radiocarbon dated, who took it off to be, you know, studied, said, well, I need a small piece of the manuscript to take to, you know, university so that they can study it. And one of the owners just said, okay, and just got a pair of scissors.

• 17:01Eleanor Janega?

  Oh, my God. Oh, okay. All right. All right. I take it back. Maybe I don't like.

• 17:07Speaker 07

  No, I mean, it's their thing. I think that's completely.

• 17:10Eleanor Janega?

  Their thing. They can do what they want. Yeah.

• 17:12Speaker 07

  That's also the case with a lot of textiles as well.

• 17:16Speaker 07

  Which is pretty cool, actually. There's a really, really good book on, I can't remember what it's called now. Something like 500 years of Indonesian textiles, something like this. Where they've radiocarbon dated textiles from what is now Indonesia. And found that they go back to the 14th century or earlier in some cases. And we're talking like batik, which was invented in in Java, probably. Sort of wax resist dyeing. And also e-cats, a kind of weaving, a kind of woven cloth. So, yeah, there is some surviving organic material from this part of the world, from the time period that we're sort of talking about. What I would call personally, the Middle Ages, but okay, that's another fraught term, of course.

• 17:58Eleanor Janega?

  I'm going to force you to talk about that immediately, Alex, because because this this is the thing is that, you know, I think increasingly we are really looking at the concept of the Middle Ages as a global phenomenon, or at least we're attempting to, right? And the thing about what's going on in what is now Indonesia is it's got a lot of kind of big kingdoms, large civilizations that do rise up in a really similar timeframe to the big changes that we see over in Europe as well, which is, doesn't do much from stopping me from calling things Middle Ages, frankly, because, you know, we've got, for example, like the new kingdoms that are coming on the rise up right around the 5th century

• 18:44Eleanor Janega?

  as well, which is very, very similar to what's going on in in Europe, right?

• 18:48Speaker 07

  Well, sort of, except that, of course, in most of Europe, this is, you know, preceded by the Roman Empire, which is a vast, literate bureaucratic entity. They didn't really have that in times at this stage.

• 19:01Speaker 07

  The development of writing and especially writing in local languages and the development of local states and trade with different parts of the world kind of all comes at the same time, which is, as you say, probably fifth century or earlier. And we start to see that coming from, the things coming from India particularly around that time, including writing, which is where most of the scripts were used in island Southeast Asia and mainland Southeast Asia as well at this time originally came from. For me, the interesting thing is not so much the development, you know, the sort of state formation and trade and stuff like, it's more that Java and Sumatra and all these kinds of places were connected to lots of other parts of Afro Eurasia in this

• 19:44Speaker 07

  period in quite a direct way. You know, in the sense that food, if you think of it like this, I like to think about food that was grown on the island of Java or in Banda in Eastern Indonesia was being eaten in Denmark and in Japan and in China and in Ethiopia at this time, if you consider spices to be food, which only they are. And on Java, on the island of Java, they grew cubeds. In fact, it's probably the only place in the world that the cubed pepper grew. It's a unique, it's endemic to that part of the world. It's a bit bigger than a peppercorn, the kind of berry that gets produced. And it's a little bit citrusy. It's just nice. It tastes pretty good. Not very common nowadays, but they were quite popular back in the Middle Ages. And we can find quite a few descriptions

• 20:27Speaker 07

  of them in various medieval European texts and Chinese ones and whatever.

• 20:33Speaker 07

  Nutmeg and cloves, those came from Eastern Indonesia, what is now Eastern Indonesia, the islands of Banda. That's where all the nutmeg in the world came from. And also in North Maluku, what's now called the province of North Maluku, that's where all the cloves in the world came from. And we find those pretty extensively in European texts, in Indian ones, in wherever. It doesn't matter which part of the world you're talking about. If you have a sizable manuscript record, you're going to find cloves and nutmeg and these kind of things. So to me, that's what makes it the Middle Ages, is that clearly these people who are living in Java were living in even further east, even close to New Guinea, a part of this interconnected sort of Afro Eurasian hemisphere.

• 21:14Speaker 07

  And you know, there were Europeans who visited on the Southeast Asian period. Marco Polo came through, for example. He didn't go to Java.

• 21:22Eleanor Janega?

  Funny that.

• 21:22Speaker 07

  But he did go to Sumatra and he stayed there for a few months. And he wrote a description of Java based on hearsay. And in which he claimed that Java was the biggest island in the world, which it isn't. And in fact, it's a little smaller than England, which is kind of amazing because Java nowadays has 145 million inhabitants, something like that. So it has more people living on it than live in Russia or Japan. That was just kind of amazing. I don't know. It's an incredible place.

• 21:49Eleanor Janega?

  Well, you know, to a certain extent, perhaps, you know, if we can be kind to him, one way to interpret it is that it's certainly one of the most important islands in the world at the time. And I suppose for me, that's what's really interesting about this part of the world is that, I mean, with all due respect to China, which likes to describe itself as the Middle Kingdom, this is sort of the middle of everything at the time, you know, everything goes through this particular series of archipelagos. Because one way that we talk about the Silk Roads is by talking about the overland routes that, you know, go through Central Asia. But the Silk Road as a maritime road certainly exists as well. And that is going through here. And it's because

• 22:34Eleanor Janega?

  just as much as you want silk from China, you want nutmeg. I mean, people are incredibly desirous of clothes and nutmeg across Afro-Eurasia. So this is moving around at huge rates. And these people are kind of unimaginably wealthy and luxurious to a certain extent. And they're living these lives that everyone is jealous of. And yet, we still kind of have an idea of these places as a place where products that we wish for and we desire come from, you know, like just saying the word Java, you know, which as a kind of old timey standard for coffee, right? Or, you know, these are all things that we know off the top of our heads as, oh yeah, well,

• 23:16Eleanor Janega?

  that's a place that things I want come from. And in the Middle Ages, it was even more important, I would say.

• 23:22Speaker 07

  Yeah. Yeah. In fact, I don't really like the term maritime Silk Road in this context.

• 23:29Speaker 07

  Because the maritime trade is so much bigger in every respect than the overland trade, and we're naming that maritime trade after what's happening, you know, through Central Asia, which is kind of a misnomer anyway. They weren't primarily trading silk, probably, you know, certainly by the period that I'm interested in the sort of, in the second millennium age, silk is everywhere anyway. People are producing silk in Java, they're producing silk in India, they're producing silk in Greece at that time. Yeah, I mean, basically, in every way, the maritime trade is big, bigger range of products. So you're saying cloves and nutmeg, but also things like pepper, of course, and also silk. And locally, also things like iron. Java, for example, is particularly poor in iron. It just doesn't

• 24:14Speaker 07

  have any. So it needs to kind of bring this stuff in from other countries. And we see these huge shipments of Chinese iron that are coming in from shipwrecks. We could see them, you know, shipwrecks in the Java Sea and in the Strait of Malacca and places like that. We can see that people were importing a lot of iron from China and also from Sulawesi, which has a lot of iron. That's another island, around the big island in what is now Indonesia. So, you know, there's a lot of different things that have been traded, and there are also a lot of different groups of people who have been connected to one another through this trade and are interacting. And when we get kind of lists of sailors and things like that in Southeast Asian literatures, they're coming from all over the place. In the text that

• 24:55Speaker 07

  I'd worked on for my PhD years ago, there's a junk that's described in the text. And a junk is this enormous ship, originally a Southeast Asian ship. We think of junk as being these Chinese ships. But originally, in medieval literatures, including European ones, and in Arabic as well, from the 14th century onwards, we get these descriptions of junks referring to enormous Southeast Asian ships capable of carrying hundreds and hundreds of merchants across the Indian Ocean, carrying vast amounts of stuff. And this is exactly, this is corroborated by the archaeological record as well. And the junk that's described, or at least one of the ships that's described in the text that I've worked on.

• 25:36Speaker 07

  They've got archers from China, they've got sailors from Sumatra, they've got people from Java as well working on, you know, it's, it's very multicultural. And this is also what we find when we're looking at inscriptions from East Java in terms of things like tax, who's paying tax and where are they coming from? They're coming from India, they're coming from all over the place. So it's a very multicultural place in a way that, you know, in a similar way, I suppose, to the overland Silk Road routes. But linking more people over much greater distances and involving a lot more money and so on. I think, I mean, yeah, we need to highlight this a lot more and kind of diminish maybe the importance of the overland Silk Road thing.

• 26:17Eleanor Janega?

  Maybe we should start calling the overland Silk Road like the landlocked Silk Road, something like that. You know, let's say that we need to take them down a peg, you know, the, the really good stuff's coming by sea always, you know, frankly, but, but I mean, and there's, there are good reasons for this. It moves faster.

• 26:34Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 26:35Eleanor Janega?

  There's a bunch of things down there that you want and that you're going to want to pick up.

• 26:38Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 26:39Eleanor Janega?

  To bring through, you know, one of the reasons why we kind of say the Silk Road, I think, up top is that it's, it's a little bit more like, yeah, no, we're, we're moving silk, we're moving fur, we're moving cloths of this description, whereas by sea, it's just so much more diverse in terms of.

• 26:53Speaker 07

  Yeah, ceramics is a big one.

• 26:55Eleanor Janega?

  Huge, you know, that the, especially the Middle Eastern, you know, I don't like using the term Middle Eastern either, but you know, the Middle Eastern desire for ceramics is absolutely enormous and we have these huge cargoes that are moving through constantly and which, you know, we found all kinds of shipwrecks that have, you know, the full, the full set of ceramics.

• 27:15Speaker 07

  The same in Southeast Asia.

• 27:16Eleanor Janega?

  Hmm.

• 27:17Speaker 07

  Whole stacks of, you know, Chinese blue and white porcelain and celadon and all sorts of amazing things like that, that are, you know, found at shipwreck sites and you couldn't transport that easily overland because it breaks. If you carry it in a caravan and a wagon, something like that, goes over a bump, you've got a real problem. Whereas waves are relatively gentle.

• 27:38Eleanor Janega?

  Hmm.

• 27:39Speaker 07

  I suppose, and if you pack them tightly and put them in a, in a, in a hold, it's sort of seems to work, which is why in medieval Europe, we find almost no Chinese porcelain at all. I think there are two pieces, maybe more, from the 14th century and later, one that's supposedly brought back by Marco Polo in Venice. Which is plausible, actually, and another one that was given to, you know, one of the Anjolín kings of Hungary or whatever it was, something like that. But in Southeast Asia, in East Africa, enormous amounts of Chinese porcelain all over the place because they could transport it very easily by sea. So, yeah. This is the other thing, of course, is that if you want to get from the Middle East, let's say, okay, let's say Middle East, but if you want to get from the Middle East and you want

• 28:24Speaker 07

  to get to China and you want to do it the quickest and most efficient, effective way, then you just use those monsoon winds to take you across the Indian Ocean to the Malacca Strait, to Sumatra, somewhere like that. And then, again, take those monsoon winds up north, up the South China Sea to China. And that's how you do it. And that's how people did do it. And so even, you know, these areas that we don't think of as being necessarily connected to Southeast Asia are, they're connected to one another through Southeast Asia. Initially, there's a pretty good book on the Southeast Asian spice trade by the Cambridge, I guess he was a geographer, Robin Duncan, and it's called Between East and West.

• 29:09Speaker 07

  And it's about cloves and nutmeg, which come from between extreme southeast of this whole trading network, but they were sort of halfway between China and India and Western African Asia. So in that sense, between east and west, which is kind of what this place is. But it also has its own stuff, you know, it's economically productive in its own way. They have their own food. They have their own stuff going on. It's not just taking things from other places and developing on them.

• 29:38Eleanor Janega?

  But so, okay, can we talk about that a little bit? Because I suppose I get so bogged down in the trade because it's cool and sexy, I'm afraid. And it's so easy to understand it as an important place because of what it means to other people. You know, if you, if you ask Chinese people, they'd be like, oh, yeah, well, you've got to have good trade links with this. And the same thing with Europeans, but they have their own important cultures and kingdoms going on at the time. So what do we know about what is happening in what is now Indonesia itself?

• 30:09Speaker 07

  Well, it sort of depends which time period you're talking about.

• 30:12Eleanor Janega?

  Just do it all, Alex. Go.

• 30:15Speaker 07

  I think that one of the key things to know here is that the people who live in Western Indonesia, live in or Malaysia and Indonesia, that sort of areas, Sumatra, the Malay Peninsula, Borneo, Java, those kind of places, they speak Austronesian languages. So languages in the Austronesian language family and specifically within the Malayopolinesian branch of the Austronesian language family. So their languages are related to Malgash, which is spoken on the island of Madagascar, which was settled from Borneo, bizarrely, in the first millennium. The like Malgash is most closely related to some Borneian languages, which just seems completely bizarre. That is what it is. And they're also related

• 30:56Speaker 07

  to Hawaiian, Samoan, Fijian, and all the languages of the wider Pacific. So this is a very, very widespread language family. And of course, those people have their own things going on. They brought to their own culture sort of with them when they migrated into the area a few thousand years ago. So we've got a bunch of different languages that are recorded in the sources. The main one, the biggest one in terms of the corpus is Old Javanese. And that's a language that was spoken basically in the eastern two thirds of the island of Java. And the political situation in Java is quite difficult to

• 31:35Speaker 07

  summarize on its own. There seems to have been a Javanese kingdom, probably in the early to mid first millennium AD. And it was centered somewhere in central Java. We have these beautiful little Indian influenced sort of Hindu and Buddhist sculpture from that period. We start to get a few inscriptions. Some of the inscriptions are in Malay or in Old Malay, which is a bit strange. Some of them are in Old Javanese. Some of them are in Sanskrit and some of them are in, you know, two or more of those languages at the same time. And that's also the place where we get some of the most famous and

• 32:16Speaker 07

  most interesting monuments, most surviving, you know, most interesting surviving things really, from Indonesia, including Borobudur, which is in central Java. And it is the world's biggest Buddhist monument. And that was built in the ninth century. And it's incredible. I mean, I recommend everyone to visit it. So it should be a bucket list item for everybody. It's incredible place. It's just a huge kind of Buddhist stupor with bar reliefs on several terraces that you can, you know, see as you go around. It's amazing. It's beautiful. Quite near that and built at around the same time is a, what is often described as

• 32:55Speaker 07

  a Hindu site called Prambanan, probably built by the same kingdom. It's this mixing of Hindu and Buddhist things that happens quite often in Southeast Asia. And then at some point in the early 10th century, this Central Javanese kingdom seems to collapse, probably around 928. That's when the inscriptions cease. We just don't get any more. And then we get this huge development in East Jav. And East Javanese stuff is totally different. The art styles are different. If you look at Central Javanese period art, so before 928, kind of like chubby people, very Indian inspired, very kind of classical Indian look. You look at the East Javanese stuff, everyone's very wiry,

• 33:38Speaker 07

  long noses. It's completely, it's like a total transformation. And we see the same thing happening with like inscriptions and scripts, the way the scripts look, how they're designed. It seems like the things that are coming from India are being increasingly indigenous, made more Javanese. So, and then there's a succession of different Javanese kingdoms that take over in that part of the world. The most famous one is Majapahid, which is also the name of the capital. That's usually the case for these Javanese kingdoms. They're named after the capital. And Majapahid was founded in 1292, 93, something like

• 34:20Speaker 07

  that, right after a Mongol invasion of Java. So Mongols invaded in 1292. They were kind of repelled. It would sort of defeat it. It is French.

• 34:33Eleanor Janega?

  Good for Java, you know, like one of the only ones to ever do it. I love to hear it, you know?

• 34:37Speaker 07

  But this was what people thought in medieval Europe. News of this reached Europe. People were really impressed that the people in Java had managed to defeat the great Khan.

• 34:45Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, no kidding.

• 34:46Speaker 07

  So, you know, this was like a big thing. In in practice, in in reality, there was actually a civil war going on.

• 34:51Eleanor Janega?

  Ah.

• 34:51Speaker 07

  The Mongols backed to the right side in the civil war. So was it a defeat? Kind of not. So, yeah, I mean, very strange, but they realized that there was no point in trying to control this very strange place where people did things differently. They just left.

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• 36:53Speaker 05

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at go.o.gle/workspacewithGemini. That's go.o.gle/workspacewithGemini.

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• 38:48Eleanor Janega?

  Very difficult to run a lot of horses through Java, to be fair. So it's a little bit culturally distinct.

• 38:54Speaker 07

  They had a lot of horses in Java, actually. This is, yeah, it's...

• 38:58Eleanor Janega?

  Oh, shows what I know. There you go.

• 39:00Speaker 07

  In fact, that some Indonesian islands were quite famous for their horses.

• 39:04Eleanor Janega?

  Really?

• 39:04Speaker 07

  At least within the Indo-Valley Archipelago and certainly when Europeans turned up, when Portuguese people turned up in the 16th century, they're quite impressed by the quality of horses from islands that you wouldn't expect. The island of Sumbawa, for example, which is really quite far to the east. You know, it's sort of, if you look on a map, it's sort of northwest a bit of Australia, famous for its horses. So, yeah, this is not a culturally completely bizarre place. They had Buddhism, they had Hindu things that were recognizable. They had camels, I mentioned in some old Javanese texts, which obviously are not native. So, yeah, it wasn't completely bizarre, but it was like, okay, this is just too chaotic a kingdom. We're not going to get involved. I think that was the attitude.

• 39:45Eleanor Janega?

  I'm going to completely reframe my relationship to this and say, see, the Mongols were trying to invade because of the good horses now. And that's, that's what I'm doing.

• 39:53Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 39:55Speaker 07

  I actually can't remember what the instigating incident was, but it was something the Javanese did. I can't remember, they mutilated an envoy or something like this.

• 40:03Eleanor Janega?

  Oh, yeah, that'll do it. Yeah, yeah.

• 40:05Speaker 07

  So, and they thought they were unfathomable because they're so far away from everything.

• 40:11Speaker 07

  This kingdom, Majapahit, basically survives from 1292 or 1293 to some point, probably in the 1480s.

• 40:21Eleanor Janega?

  That's a pretty good run.

• 40:22Speaker 07

  It's not bad, certainly for a Javanese kingdom. They're usually a little bit shorter than actually. Anyway, so what happens in the late 15th century is that Muslims turn up in large numbers or people are converted to Islam in large numbers, certainly in the port cities around the Javanese coast, especially the north coast of Java. And this should, seems to be a very bad thing from the perspective of the Hindu Buddhist. It's a kind of a mixed cult of Hindu and Buddhist things at that point, state, you know, inland. And so these cities start to break away. That means that the economic power is taken away from the center. And by the time the Portuguese people, by the time the first Portuguese expedition, I

• 41:07Speaker 07

  should say, in 1513, this kingdom was basically gone. There's a sort of little rump state in the extreme east of Java, but basically it's turned into lots of little mostly Muslim polities along the coast and interior.

• 41:23Speaker 07

  And then in Western Java, there's the Kingdom of Sunda, which seems to go back quite a long way. We don't really know when it began. It's not very well evidenced, and it probably had quite a small population because they have volcanoes in across Java. In fact, it's the most volcanic island in the world. So that's usually how it's described anyway. And the volcanoes in West Java produce apparently much more acidic ejecta. So the stuff that comes out of them is not as good for agriculture, doesn't contain as many nutrients. And then combine that with really heavy rainfall that leaches the nutrients out of the soil that does actually exist and you get, well, not really a great agricultural base. And so this was probably quite a small kingdom in terms of population, but it seems to have been

• 42:09Speaker 07

  governing that western third of Java for a few hundred years. And when the Portuguese turned up, they were quite impressed by it and they wanted to establish an alliance with Sunda. And in 1522, they actually did. And then, well, because the Portuguese and the various Muslim polities in Southeast Asia saw each other as mortal enemies. The armies of these Muslim Javanese cities on the coast then invaded Sunda and no more Sunda, basically by about 1570 something. And then there's Sumatra, which has a, yeah, well, I mean, how long have you got for all these things? I don't know. But anyways, so Sumatra is its own thing.

• 42:49Speaker 07

  The most important thing that people probably need to know about Sumatra is that there was a kind of a kingdom. I don't want to call it an empire. There was called Srivijaya. A lot of people say that it didn't exist. There are inscriptions with that word on. So I mean, it existed in some form. And this was probably based at the city of Palembang in South Sumatra. There have been quite a few finds there, archaeologically speaking, including a bunch of inscriptions in Old Malay from the 7th century. And it seems to have been basically a Buddhist place. And the place that had a lot of trading connections, if you look on a map, Palembang is right there at the bottom, the southern end

• 43:29Speaker 07

  of the Strait of Malacca, which is still one of the world's most important waterways in terms of trade. They were probably trying to control that. And this polity, well, I don't know, I hmm, exists in some form. From the seventh century, certainly, all the way through to probably the fourteenth, something like that. At various points, it's invaded by various different groups of people.

• 43:58Speaker 07

  There's an invasion in the 11th century coming from southern India, the Chola Dynasty. People who, the Tamil kings there invaded, I think it was 1025, they invaded South Sumatra. You know, kicked out the king. They seem to have sent some diplomatic missions to China as well from there. So they seem to have actually taken it over for a little bit. But it doesn't seem to last. There isn't some sort of long lasting Indian kingdom in Southeast Asia or anything like that. And then later on, Palambang itself is taken over by Chinese pirates.

• 44:29Eleanor Janega?

  Ah.

• 44:29Speaker 07

  Um, which is good fun. And when the treasure fleets in the early Ming Dynasty, at the beginning of the 15th century, when they're sent out into the world by the Yongle Emperor. One of the things that they do in Sumatra is to kick out these pirates, arrest the ringleader, take him back to Beijing and have him executed. So, yeah, it's a very interesting place.

• 44:53Eleanor Janega?

  You know, so.

• 44:56Speaker 07

  I mean, there's a lot more to say about Sumatra. There's always so much more to say about all of these places. So in the north of Sumatra as well, there are a lot of very interesting little kingdoms.

• 45:04Eleanor Janega?

  Mm hmm.

• 45:04Speaker 07

  And other things, I mean, not even kingdoms. I don't even know what's called little polities, little something. There's a place called Barus that was very famous for producing kampha. Comes from the inside of trees. And you can use a lot of, you know, it's mentioned in the Quran. It's mentioned in lots and lots of different medieval texts from across Afro Eurasia. Some recipes for gunpowder from medieval Europe include kampha as well. If you want to supercharge your gunpowder, put some kampha in it.

• 45:31Eleanor Janega?

  Okay.

• 45:32Speaker 07

  And the word that they're using, that word kampha, comes from a Malay word. The Malay word originally was kapur, which also means chalk, because it's sort of white substance. And it was originally called kapur barus, which means camph, yeah, chalk from barus in Sumatra.

• 45:48Speaker 07

  And a very interesting place. There are some Tamil inscriptions from there as well, from the 11th century. And there's also a description in Arabic by a Coptic priest from the 13th century, where he claims that there were Christian churches that had been built in Barus. But he describes them as Nestorian, so meaning probably some Indian church of the East, something like that. So there were probably Tamil-speaking Christians. But we don't really know. This is just one text, one opinion. We certainly haven't found any churches there, but they probably would have been made of wood. So who knows?

• 46:22Eleanor Janega?

  I mean, I guess that wouldn't be particularly surprising, given the excellent links that they have with East Africa and, you know, as you say, India and places like that. I would not be surprised at all that some Christians got on a boat at a point in time. You know, that there's rather a lot of different ways. Yeah.

• 46:41Speaker 07

  Not remotely surprising. Yeah. And there are some texts in the Chirogoniza as well that talk about Jewish merchants who visited this part of Sumatra at around the same time. And in fact, one of them died there. At least one of them is known to have died in Sumatra. And this, you know, the text in the Chirogoniza is saying, by the way, this guy's died. So, you know, in this really far off place, by the way, it's called, you know, Barus. They don't actually use the word Barus. They use the word Fansur, which is the Arabic name for the place. It's very complicated. But this is a name for a nearby place. It's known as Barus in basically every other text.

• 47:17Eleanor Janega?

  Well, this is the thing, though. We get a lot of historical documents that tell us little bits and things about it that are coming, you know, out of Arabic or different cultural traditions, because they're spending so much time in contact with, you know, you gotta get someone over to Sumatra immediately, or, you know, where are all your goods going to come from? So, you know, we have excellent records in Arabic of trade relations. We certainly know that things are being sent to different sultans. You know, if you are, if you're anyone who's anyone, kind of on the Arabian Peninsula, at some point in time, you're going to want some things that are brought over. So we know there are lots of contractual obligations that are being made. And there is just rather a lot of cultural back and forth here, which, you know, I suppose this is completely unsurprising because we

• 48:02Eleanor Janega?

  have these very wealthy empires and kingdoms. And of course, they're going to end up in contact with one another.

• 48:09Speaker 07

  Basically, yeah. Actually, I'd say probably the most important records are in Chinese. Not to me personally. I don't really care particularly about, you know, who was in power this year or whatever. But then that's the kind of thing that we get from Chinese texts. If you look at a lot of dynastic histories, they will say, in such and such a year, we received a visit from, you know, an embassy from Java or an embassy from this kingdom. And philologists will have worked out over time that this kingdom is referring to a place in Sumatra or Borneo or wherever else. So the Chinese texts are most important for that kind of thing. If you want to know a sort of rough outline, a chronology of who's in power, where and when, those Chinese texts are the most important ones. Yeah. And then

• 48:53Speaker 07

  Arabic, of course, there's a lot. Also, in European languages to some extent, Marco Polo, of course, left, well, he didn't write it, but you know, there's the Marco Polo travels and we get quite a lot of interesting information in there. Doesn't tell us like really granular detail, but he did stay in Sumatra for several months and he does talk about the different kingdoms that were there. There were other European visitors as well. I mean, there's Niccolo de Conti in the 15th century. He says that the Javanese are the worst people in the world. They're the cruelest. They kill one another for fun. You know, if they buy a new sword, they just test it out on a person. You know, this kind of, they eat

• 49:36Speaker 07

  mice and rats and dogs and whatever, this kind of thing. So, yeah, he has a very low opinion. I think this is because by the time he was there, well, I don't know. I think this is just bigotry to some extent, but I think this is partly because at that point, you know, this kingdom, Madrapai in East Java is breaking down. A lot of this kind of stuff is not going so well over there. So maybe that's, that's it. Ibn Ubathutu as well, you know, writing in Arabic, he also has a very low opinion of people in Java, but he didn't really visit very many non-Muslim places and he does seem to have been quite bigoted towards people who weren't Muslims and that included people in Java at the time. So who knows? There's a limit to what we can infer from this.

• 50:34Speaker 05

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithGemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithGemini. This is Nick and Jack from The Best One Yet, and we are excited to tell you about Walmart Business. Staying ahead of business trends means moving fast and adapting quickly. Walmart Business helps you simplify operations

• 51:18Speaker 05

  so you can focus on building the next big thing. Find exactly what your organization needs with their ever-expanding business assortment and everyday low prices. Keep your momentum going fast with reliable shipping and fulfillment. Eligible organizations can take advantage of tax-free shopping, both in-store and online, saving you more while getting you everything you need. It's Walmart built for your business. Sign up for a free Walmart Business account today at business.walmart.com.

• 51:59Eleanor Janega?

  So is there a particular reason why we see this breakdown in power in the 15th century? You know, is this kind of symptomatic of the generalized changes that we see globally in at this time?

• 52:10Speaker 07

  I don't think so. No, I think, well, most people say it's, you know, that basically Muslim merchants are arriving in the North Coast of Java. They want to have some tax breaks from the local government, the Javanese government. The Javanese government seems to give them these tax breaks. That means that money is no longer flowing to the central government. And they also don't have an ideological, you know, relationship, really. That, you know, there's these Muslim traders on the coast and then there's these inland farmers who disdain trade, who think it's just this terribly uncouth thing to do. If you look at old Javanese literature, very often ships are shipwrecked. You know, this is a thing that happens if you go out on the sea. It's a terrible place to be. Don't go there.

• 52:55Speaker 07

  You know, so there's this real disconnect between the coast and this inland government, this inland kingdom. It's something to do with that, really. This sort of breakdown in authority as a result of no longer having very much money.

• 53:08Eleanor Janega?

  Hmm. I suppose that that's just kind of the name of the game, isn't it? If you're in these areas that are incredibly wealthy and can access huge parts of the world with goods, then the minute money stops going in the right direction, everything is just a problem, isn't it?

• 53:23Speaker 07

  Yeah. And this didn't mean that like everybody suddenly had horrible lives, I don't think. Because, you know, the East Java is quite agriculturally productive. You know, they had this pretty good rainfall. They've got the volcanoes that produce this wonderful soil. So, you know, they seem to have had pretty decent agricultural surplus, large population, all of those kind of things in East Java. But that doesn't mean you automatically get to control all the money and the power on the island. And that's probably what happened over time. It's just, yeah, money stopped flowing.

• 53:59Eleanor Janega?

  Well, you know, it's one of those things where I suppose they've got all the spice all ready. They've got all the wonderful food that everybody wants. So, you know, if if trade breaks down, it's sort of like, oh, well, I guess we'll have to keep eating our delicious food. That's terrible, you know?

• 54:12Speaker 07

  You know, what's it? They did have some spices, of course. I mentioned cubebs, which came from Java. They were grown and harvested. We actually had some texts about tax exemptions for people growing cubebs, which is very cool. And for growing some other things as well, like black pepper. And I actually gave a paper on this once, but I can't remember what the other ones were. Okay, whatever. Anyway, it was like four nice spices. But stuff like cloves and nutmeg, those had to come from somewhere else. They came from the East. So what's really interesting, actually, is that in the old Javanese corpus, we very, very rarely find any reference to these things.

• 54:50Eleanor Janega?

  Interesting.

• 54:51Speaker 07

  They just don't talk about cloves or spices in general.

• 54:55Eleanor Janega?

  Huh.

• 54:56Speaker 07

  I think cloves come up once. And I think it's more in a kind of Indian sort of context. cloves often appear in Indian literature in this form of as a tree, actually. They didn't grow in India, but there's this idea of like clove trees as emblematic of southern India. And it's kind of appearing in that role in Java.

• 55:15Eleanor Janega?

  Because it just might be one of those things where it's so common, why would you talk about it? But then on the other, yeah.

• 55:20Speaker 07

  It's gotta be that, hasn't it? Like.

• 55:22Eleanor Janega?

  We're like saying, oh, wow, there's air around me right now. You know, I'm not going to write that down, am I? But it is so funny because of what I guess it's the trouble with being defined as a place because of what everybody else wants from you. And the trouble that we have in terms of sources and knowing exactly what's happening on the ground over there is that you end up with these hopelessly foreign definitions of a place that is its own place. It's so frustrating. I mean, it's frustrating for me. I can't imagine how difficult it is for you, the guy who wants to have these sources, you know?

• 55:56Speaker 07

  Well, I guess, I don't know. Like, I think if people cared more about about this part of the world, it would be a problem. But, you know, it's a part of the world that people don't have very many misconceptions about because they just don't have very, very many preconceptions about. It's just a part of the world people don't know anything about. You say Java, people think coffee. You say Sumatra, oh yeah, that must be some sort of exotic island somewhere. You know, instead of Java, the world's third most populous landmass, which is what it is, you know, after Afro-Eurasia and the Americas. So.

• 56:31Eleanor Janega?

  This is so interesting because it's sort of the opposite problem to European medieval history, right? Where Europe, you know, I don't, I don't want to be one of those people who says that Europe isn't important because of course it's important. Everywhere is important. Stop that. That's nonsense. But, you know, I spend all of my time fighting misconceptions about, you know, a part of the world that we know a lot about. Even though, you know, let's say, I don't know, England isn't going to rank very high on someone in Java's imagination at the time. But then you go to the other part of the world, which is hugely populous, hugely important, massively wealthy, and nobody knows anything about it.

• 57:07Speaker 07

  I think what's interesting actually in that connection is that people in England knew the name of the island of Java. But people in Java did not know the name of of England or even of Europe. They have no conception of it as far as we can tell from the text that we have. So they knew about Delhi. Certainly by the 14th century, we get these, you know, references, these sort of lists actually of different place names. And a lot of them are in the Indo Malaysian archipelago, they're in Malaysia, they're in Indonesia, but they include China, they include Cambodia, the Delhi Sultanate, or, you know, Tamil kingdoms in, in southern India and, you know, Arabia and Africa.

• 57:48Speaker 07

  There's a old Javanese word for East Africa, which is Jungi. We don't really know where it came from and it might be, well, who knows? I'm not going to go there actually. There's a whole etymological argument about that word. But anyway, so that's the name that they have for East Africa. So they're aware of this kind of Indian Ocean, South China Sea world, connected by the monsoon winds. And they're not really aware of Europe. So you can spin that one way, you can say, oh, Europe was poor and irrelevant, which is not the case, I don't think, at all. And in fact, you know, it's driving a lot of that trade. Europe is a huge, you know, buyer of these spices that are coming straight from Java.

• 58:32Speaker 07

  So you can spin it that way, you can say, oh, Europe's irrelevant. Or you could just say, actually, people in Europe just had more texts. They had more manuscripts to be able to draw on going back, you know, much further back in time because of a more favorable climate.

• 58:48Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, certainly. I mean, it's just one of these things about the vagaries of how history works. You know, we're dependent on documents making it for hundreds, if not thousands of years. And that can be really difficult. You know, the, the things that I worry about as a Europeanist are like, you know, a library catching on fire. Or I don't know, Henry VIII, I worry about him a lot. He's, he's not good for a source of survival. Or just like, you know, Marie Theresa deciding she's going to reorganize her library. These are the things that get us in trouble. But in Indonesia, the issue is just...

• 59:22Eleanor Janega?

  Literally the weather and it's such a huge one, you know?

• 59:27Speaker 07

  Well, that, you know, also fires and, you know, destruction and deliberate, you know, that there must have been quite a sizable literature in the Malay language.

• 59:37Eleanor Janega?

  Mm hmm.

• 59:38Speaker 07

  In old Malay. We don't have any of it really. But we do have quite a lot of classical Malay texts or so-called classical Malay texts. And this means basically Muslim literature in Malay and written in the Jawi script, which is the Arabic script adapted for writing Malay. And that first appears we have an inscription in Jawi from thirteen oh three, I think it is from Tranganu on the east coast of the Malay peninsula. So people have been writing in Jawi for, you know, a good seven hundred years.

• 1:00:09Speaker 07

  We don't have anything really before that. And people must have kind of suppressed to some extent the Hindu and Buddhist stuff that was originally written in Malay. So there's definitely deliberate destruction. Well, they're probably deliberate. Obviously, don't know, but I have the sources. They're probably deliberate destruction. And then there's also the weather and then there's also any random event, you know, volcanic eruption or big storm, who knows? So, yeah, not a lot survives. Like I said, maybe a dozen manuscripts from before the 16th century, probably more. Yeah, I don't know. Libraries don't want to date them. They're very fragile. So chemically dating them is hard and not very many of them have dated collar farms. So it's tough.

• 1:00:51Eleanor Janega?

  It's hard out here. Well, so I mean, I guess that what we do have, though, is some pretty cool stonework. We've got some nice things to work with archaeologically, of course. But, you know, then again, as you said, the minute something is built in wood, that's also kind of out the window after a few hundred years. So, hmm. But.

• 1:01:10Speaker 07

  Yeah, essentially, I was in Japan last month and we went to Nara, which is a very beautiful place, and they have the oldest wooden buildings in the world there from the seventh century, you know, the Horyuji Temple and the Shausoi, which was built as an arkite. And it's amazing to see these things, you know, imagining that if they had had that in Java, and they probably did have something analogous to that, you know, huge ark. It just wouldn't have lasted. There was not, there wouldn't have been really any feasible way to make these things last. So. So we know a lot more about Japan than we do about Java. And I think that plays a role in the importance of Japan in popular culture today and the relative unimportance of Java.

• 1:01:51Speaker 07

  Even though Java has more people, you know, in a history that is in principle just as old and just as long and just as interesting.

• 1:01:59Eleanor Janega?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, here we are, we're sitting around talking about what is now the largest Muslim country in the world and where there's a certain amount of guesswork about what happened before Islam's cessation, you know, it's really boggling. But I think that's why it's so important, right? It's not just important because of how important it was in the medieval period, which of course it was. But I think having these conversations where you talk about the difficulties of just literally doing history as a discipline and how that shapes public imagination. So in the same way that, you know, medieval people in Java are probably not busy sitting around thinking about England, we're just not able to imagine on mass what it's like

• 1:02:42Eleanor Janega?

  to be in the Strait of Malacca as a result of these little things. And I don't know, it's kind of romantic, but also it's a little bit frustrating.

• 1:02:53Speaker 07

  Yeah, it means it's quite a small field, partly because there isn't that much to work on. On the other hand, there's so much more to do. I think the reason to get in interested in it, the reason to start reading about these things is just that there's so much great stuff in Old Java and its literature, so much great stuff in Old Sunday as well. There's a lot of just wonderful things to read, different perspectives that you haven't heard before. So it's not just, oh, this place was important in trade, oh, this place was important because they were rich and they had, you know, big kingdoms and big monuments. It's also, you know, the people and they have different ways of doing literature and different ways of doing a religious practice. And I mean, the texts that I worked on for my PhD that I mentioned, Pujan Gomani, the edition, by the way, is being published next month by Brill.

• 1:03:39Eleanor Janega?

  Congratulations. Wow.

• 1:03:40Speaker 07

  Well, it's taken a while, but anyway, so that text is very, very interesting. It has a lot of references to all sorts of interesting things. It has a very stark, simple Spartan way of describing things, but it just sort of layers on these little details, you know, just like a little dab of paint here and there. It's a great effect. It's a really, really nice text. I don't know if you could, you know, if you look at the manuscript, it's a little palm leaf manuscript. It's It's not inked, it's just the letters are cut into the leaf using a knife. And when you look at it, it doesn't, you know, it's not exactly like sort of très richeur or something like that. It's not some amazing glorious, you know, illuminated manuscript or something.

• 1:04:25Speaker 07

  But in its own way, it is beautiful. And I think, you know, these kind of things people need to be aware of, just because they're nice, they're little human things that we should know about and appreciate. In Sundar, there were two different classes of manuscript, from what we can tell. They had one which was like a presentation manuscript, and that is ink on a different kind of leaf, thicker leaf, much, you know, much more elegant, much more beautiful, and presented usually in like red lacquer boxes, very, very nice.

• 1:04:55Speaker 07

  The kind that I was working on this, this text, it's in a black lacquer box, but the lacquer's all scuffed up from rubbish. And anyway, it's broken. And the, you know, the leaves are kind of small, they're all different colors a little bit, the leaves, you know, it's, it's not quite as good. And we know that this was supposed to be a text that you actually used, that was actually spoken aloud for an audience, which I think is kind of more interesting. So.

• 1:05:23Eleanor Janega?

  I love, I love that. No, that, that to me, these are the ones, right? Because the more people have listened to or got their hands on a particular manuscript, the more I like it. I don't care if you have the most beautiful, if you're the très richeur, okay, look, I'm not, don't let anyone say that I don't like the très richeur, because I do. But fundamentally, what a king has or a duke has, that five people are going to see is not as important to me as what actually influences culture. What I want to hear about is what large groups of people are involved in. And that's what we're talking about here.

• 1:05:55Speaker 07

  Yeah, to some extent, I think with the old Javanese literature, we are talking about, you know, fancy pants people honing fancy pants manuscripts and fancy pants stories.

• 1:06:07Speaker 07

  But those are interesting as well, and they give us a lot of insights into daily life and these kind of things. There's actually a really wonderful book by Helen Crease that I would recommend. If you're interested in Javanese literature, it's called Women of the Kakawin World. Kakawin is the sort of premier old Javanese poetic tradition. And it's about women's lives as portrayed in these texts, who are written by men, but that seem to portray something of the life of a noble woman in Java over a period of several centuries. And they have all sorts of interesting things in there, like same-sex attraction between women and that kind of thing. So, yeah. I think that's actually a really good place to begin if you're interested in Javanese literature.

• 1:06:52Eleanor Janega?

  And frankly, everybody should be. So that's signing everyone homework. Go read Javanese literature if you want to impress me, you know.

• 1:07:03Speaker 07

  I mean, you can, you should be able to find these things online if you really want to. There are quite a few of them that have been translated into English. Not always amazingly, but increasingly, yeah, they are available in, you know, bilingual editions. So get up there, have a look.

• 1:07:17Eleanor Janega?

  I guess, Alex, to kind of wrap us up, is there anything, you know, other than signposting where people can get their hands on some cool literature? Is there, what is the takeaway that you want an audience to get? When, you know, we're talking about a huge number of people, a lot of land, and we just covered about, you know, a thousand years or so, give or take in this conversation.

• 1:07:39Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:07:40Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, almost something like that. What does that matter between friends? You know, if you, if we were to tell an interested audience, this is the takeaway. What is it that you want to impress upon people?

• 1:07:52Speaker 07

  I don't know. I guess the fact that it is this hugely important region in basically everywhere. It isn't important for one reason. It's like a continent. It's like Europe. It's like the Middle East, whatever you want to call it. It's like India. It's like China. It has this ancient history. It has lots of different literary traditions. It has all these trade connections. It has people talking about it in other countries. They were invaded by the Mongols. You know, it's like this hugely interesting place in every way. And You won't lose anything. Well, you lose some time, maybe. I don't know. Maybe you can find it very interesting, but you won't lose anything by becoming interested in it and reading about it, learning about it. It will enrich your life.

• 1:08:34Eleanor Janega?

  Alex, this has been such a pleasure, and I'm sorry for trying to get you to cram so much into such a short time, but thank you so much for letting me drag you along to pick your brain.

• 1:08:45Speaker 07

  Well, thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure.

• 1:08:48Eleanor Janega?

  Thanks to Alex West and to you for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries, including my recent episode, The Medieval Apocalypse, and ad-free podcasts by signing up at historyhit.com/subscription. You can follow Gone Medieval on Spotify, where you can leave us comments and suggestions, or wherever you get your podcasts, and tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. Until next time.

• 1:09:41Speaker 05

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at go.o.gle/workspacewithgemini. That's go.o.gle/workspacewithgemini.

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