Henri Chambert-Loir

MALAYCOLOPHONS

The study of Malay codicology has made remarkable progress during

the last few decades whereas Malay philology – in the restricted sense
of the art of producing reliable editions – seems to be at a standstill.
What is still needed in the field of Malay codicology, however, is a
comparative study of manuscripts, focusing on features such as paper,
layout, illustrations and handwriting.
One such topic is colophons. A superficial examination (through
catalogues) of nearly 2,000 Malay manuscripts shows that 40% contain
a colophon, but these are very diverse in the type of information they
convey, ranging from a single trifle (the hour of copying, for instance)
to a long series of solid statements about the text, the manuscript, the
copyist and his work. The prime use of this information is, of course, to
locate a specific manuscript in time and space, but a comparative study
of colophons also brings some insights into the act of copying
manuscripts and the history of copying in the Malay world.

The study of Nusantaran manuscripts has experienced significant progress

lately. This is particularly evident in the recent publication of a number of
catalogues of manuscripts, which are more detailed and more systematic than
most of the older ones. The catalogue of Javanese manuscripts in the Faculty
of Letters of Universitas Indonesia by Tim Behrend and Titik Pudjiastuti
(1997), the catalogue of Malay manuscripts in the University of Leiden by
Edwin Wieringa (1998), and the catalogue of manuscripts in Buton by
Achadiati Ikram et al. (2003) are good examples of this. Inventories are
increasingly complete; our knowledge of the wealth of manuscripts grows
ever more detailed; editions of texts are becoming more numerous too. What
is still needed in the field of Malay codicology, however, is a comparative
study of manuscripts, focusing on – among other things – paper, layout,
illustrations and handwriting. This is why I wish to offer here a few remarks
and thoughts, and a few questions too, about one aspect of Malay
manuscripts which deserve a special study, namely their colophons.
For this paper I will use several catalogues, which illustrate perfectly the
point that so little attention has been paid to colophons so far that any serious
364 I ND ON E S I A AN D T H E M A LA Y W O R L D
study will have to be done through an examination of the manuscripts
themselves,1 although

1
In several catalogues colophons are only recorded partially or are even ignored. In this
regard van Ronkel (1909) is quite careless: he describes for instance 25 manuscripts
written by Muhammad Bakir without even once mentioning his name; the information he
picks up from colophons is often limited to years; and the number of colophons he
mentions is proportionately much fewer compared to other catalogues. Even an extremely
rigorous catalogue such as that of the

Indonesia and the Malay World Vol. 34, No. 100 November 2006, pp. 363–381
ISSN 1363-9811 print/ISSN 1469-8382 online # 2006 Editors, Indonesia and the Malay World
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/13639810601130218

the numerous illustrations found in E. Wieringa’s catalogue somewhat

alleviate this deficiency. By perusing the catalogues of six manuscript
collections (i.e. those of the National Library of Indonesia in Jakarta, the
National Library of Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur, the library of Leiden
University, the British collections, the German collections, and the French
National Library in Paris), I was able to collate information on 1,965
manuscripts2 and 798 colophons within these manuscripts.
The Malay manuscript tradition has its origin in the Arabic and the
IndoPersian traditions. Colophons in Arabic manuscripts have been very
thoroughly researched (see De´ roche et al. 2000). Any conclusions that can
be reached about Malay colophons should be described and analysed so that
they may be compared with the two above-mentioned traditions as well as
with other Nusantaran traditions, mainly the Javanese one 3. But first a word
has to be said about what a colophon is. Most dictionaries and
encyclopaedias define a colophon as ‘a final paragraph’ in some manuscripts
which gives particulars of authorship, date and place of production. A good
reference in this regard is the 1911 edition (online) of the Encyclopaedia
Britannica. A renowned specialist in the field of classical philology, A. Dain,
also understands a colophon to be placed at the end of a manuscript (1964:
35) and the excellent Introduction to codicology by J. Lemaire gives the
following definition: ‘The colophon is the final formula in which the copyist
mentions the place of copying, its date, his own name or even that of the
commissioner’ (1989: 165). Lemaire adds that colophons may sometimes be
‘integrated into the end of the text’ and gives as an example a colophon ‘set
in octosyllabic lines like the rest of the treatise’– something which reminds us
of the syair composed by Muhammad Bakir and attached to the end of his
manuscripts (we will come back to this later). However, De´ roche et al.
(2005: 318) mentions that in the Islamic manuscript tradition colophons do
not have to be at the end of a text, but can sometimes be at the beginning. In
this article I choose to define colophons as a ‘final paragraph’ added on
 M A L A Y C O L O P H ON S 365
purpose by the copyist, and to ignore similar information given elsewhere
(even though I may occasionally mention such information).

British collections by Ricklefs and Voorhoeve (1977) is incomplete, as can be seen for
instance through the additional information found in L. Brakel’s description of the
manuscripts of the Hikayat Muhammad Hanafiah (Brakel 1975). Another kind of
difficulty is caused by information provided by catalogues without mentioning their exact
source, i.e. whether it is obtained from colophons or from other passages in the
manuscripts. Yet other elements might affect my conclusions: some manuscripts lack
their final pages, so that we do not know whether they contained a colophon, and it is not
always clear if a colophon contains information about the manuscript it is found in, or
about the source from which that manuscript was copied.
2
The number of manuscripts described in these catalogues is actually higher, but I do not
take into consideration here a few categories of manuscripts, viz. dictionaries, word-lists,
letters, contracts, manuscripts made up of a few pages only, manuscripts copied by
Europeans, and most manuscripts written in Latin characters.
3
Raechelle Rubinstein (1996) has offered a remarkable study of the numerous and
detailed colophons of one Balinese scribe.
Information that can be found in colophons pertains to the following
matters:
(a) the work copied (i.e. the text): author; place and date of composition;
circumstances and aim of composition;
(b) the copy itself (i.e. the manuscript): date of copying (Muslim and
Christian dates;day of the week; hour); name of the copyist; place of
copying; details of the manuscript (paper, format); owner of the
manuscript; source manuscript (date, owner).

Some catalogues record all the information found in the manuscripts,

while others only record the date and place of copying. For example,
according to the catalogues, the hour at which the process of copying ended
is found in 27% of the manuscripts in German collections and 22% of the
manuscripts in the University of Leiden, but only once in collections in Kuala
Lumpur, Jakarta and Great Britain, and not even once in the Paris collection.
The figures below must be interpreted with this fact in mind.
The frequency of occurence of the following types of data found in our
corpus (798 colophons) is as follows:
(a) information on the work copied (author or date): 99
(b) information about the copy itself
Muslim date: 411
Christian date: 270
day of the week: 147
366 I ND ON E S I A AN D T H E M A LA Y W O R L D
hour: 42
name of copyist: 202
place of copying: 239
owner: 56
source manuscript: 20
When examining this data attention has to be paid to the subject categories of
the relevant texts (I have distinguished five broad categories only, viz.
literature, religion, history, law, others) because the tradition of copying is
not expected to be the same for all categories. For example, information
about the work copied is mostly to be found in religious manuscripts, 1
something which is not surprising as we often know the authors of religious
texts, while literary texts are generally anonymous. The number of colophons
found in the five subject categories is as follows:
literature, 367 ¼ 46 % of all
colophons
religion, 297 ¼ 37 %
history, 73 ¼9%
law, 37 ¼5%
other, 24 ¼3%
total, 798 ¼ 100%
However, these figures are highly relative, as some colophons contain
complete data while others only convey rather insignificant pieces of
information such as the hour or the day of the week when the copying was
completed.
The first use of colophons is to convey information about the text copied
(name of author, date and place of composition). This type of data is found,
for example, in a number of Kuala Lumpur manuscripts which are mostly of
a religious nature but it remains rather rare because such information is
usually inscribed at the beginning of manuscripts rather that at the end.
The second use of colophons is to convey information about copying, and
this is what will be discussed below, because while data about texts belongs
to the study of literary history, data about copies concerns codicology.
The main information given about manuscript copies is the date and place
of copying and the name of the copyist, and this is also the order in which
such information is most frequently found. Few colophons give all three
pieces of information (80 out of 798, that is 10% of the colophons and only
4% of the 1,965 manuscripts).

Information about time

1
Information about the text is found in 28% of religious manuscripts and only in 2% of
literary manuscripts.
 M A L A Y C O L O P H ON S 367
Most manuscripts in our corpus date back only to the 19th century or even
only to the second half of the century. Therefore it is not possible to carry out
any diachronic study of the evolution of colophons from the point of view of
either content or form.
The date of copying may be given in terms of either the Muslim or
Christian calender, or both. It may also be fragmentary – only day and month
being noted down, or the day of the week, the hour, or the name of the year
according to the local cycle (daur kecil). Numbers may be written in figures
or spelt out in words e.g. in the manuscript BNF Mal.-pol. 103 III, IV 2 the
year is written both in figures and in words in Arabic. In CUL Or. 193 the
year is given according to the ‘year of the world’. 3 The Muslim year is twice
called ‘Arabic’ (sanat al-Arab; in SB Schoemann V 27 and PNRI BG 146),
while the Christian year is once called the ‘year of Jesus’ (Hijrat Nabi Isa; in
LUB Cod.Or. 1727). In two manuscripts (LUB Cod.Or. 1695 and PNRI BG
245) the year is given in the Muslim, Christian and Javanese calenders.
Colophons containing a year are quite numerous: 616, i.e., 77% of all
colophons, which also means that dated manuscripts comprise 31% of the
whole corpus. In other words, insofar as the figures quoted here are reliable,
the date of copying of almost a third of Malay manuscripts is known. Dated
colophons are not found in the same proportion in all categories of texts. The
highest proportion occurs in historical texts (92% of colophons in that
category are dated); they are still numerous in legal and literary texts (89%
and 82% respectively), but are significantly less common in religious texts
(66%). Colophons containing a Christian year (with or without a Muslim
one) amount to 269, most of which (167) figure in literary manuscripts. Only
48 colophons contain both Muslim and Christian years, with half of these
occuring in literary works. On the other hand, colophons containing data
about time (day, month, hour) but without a year number 66 and are mostly
found in religious works.
These figures are difficult to explain. First of all, they may be distorted
by the nature of the documentation used here, as the catalogue of the National
Library of Malaysia, which mainly holds religious manuscripts, is more
detailed than most others. Another cause of distortion may be the origin of
the manuscripts: a large proportion of Nusantaran manuscripts in European
collections, and possibly also in Jakarta, but not in Malaysian collections,

2
References to the manuscripts consist of shelfmarks preceded by an abbreviation of the
name of the relevant library; a list of these abbreviations is given below in the list of
manuscript sources. Where there may be ambiguity, references to manuscripts are placed
between square brackets.
3
According to Ricklefs & Voorhoeve (1977: 118) it was ‘copied in the year of the world
-
7587’. This ‘year of the world’ (kawn al-‘a lam) was in use among the Malekites; it starts
on 1 September, 5509 BC (De´ roche 2000: 347). But then 7587 would be 2078 AD
which makes no sense.
368 I ND ON E S I A AN D T H E M A LA Y W O R L D
were copied on commission from European officials or collectors, and to
some extent under their supervision. It is therefore possible that this
European influence had some bearing on the presence of colophons and even
on their contents (for example, the importance of Christian dates). 4
We know that copyists of religious texts were more meticulous and
conscientious than copyists of literary texts. Therefore we might expect
colophons in religious texts to be more complete and detailed than those in
literary texts, but this assumption is contradicted by the evidence. There is a
possibility that copyists of religious texts tended to ignore years in view of
the intemporal nature of the texts they were dealing with, while they noted
down the day or hour of copying because of a specific convention. We may
wonder why a copyist would want to record at what time he finished copying
a manuscript. This preoccupation with time can also be found in other types
of written documents: for instance, in the letter-writing tradition, where hours
were sometimes mentioned too (see Gallop 1994), as well as in seals (see
Gallop 2002: 162), and in court edicts in Malay and Old Javanese (see Gallop
2003: 16). Therefore the apparently frivolous mention of a specific hour in a
colophon (e.g. ‘Finished on a Saturday at one o’clock in the month of
Muharram’5) might actually reflect an emphasis on the auspicious nature of
the time of composition of a document.
Ian Proudfoot has drawn my attention to the exceptional way in which
the time of day is given in three different ways in one colophon, i.e. ketika
isya akan waktunya, pukul sepuluh zuhara saatnya (LUB Cod.Or. 1955,
reproduced in Wieringa 1998: 182) where the time of prayer (waktu), the
hour (pukul or jam), and the reference to the bintang tujuh (saat) are all
recorded. Information about time of day may indeed be given in two main
ways, either in terms of the hour or the prayer time (the saat is found
nowhere else in my corpus). However, it is difficult to be precise in this
regard, as the catalogues themselves are imprecise: thus information on time
of day is found in, respectively, 28.6% and 21.7% of the German and the
Leiden collections, but in only 1.8%, 2.4%, 0.4% and 1.1% of the Kuala
Lumpur, Paris,
Jakarta and British collections.
While keeping this reservation in mind, we can nonetheless observe that,
apart from two references to petang (both of which happen to be petang
Jumat) and one combination of jam pukul dua waktu lohor, the prayer time
(waktu) is mentioned notably less frequently (seven references) than the hour
(34). A striking difference between these two systems is that the majority of
references to hours (jam pukul) refer to the morning, while the prayer times
4
This remark has been prompted by Annabel Teh Gallop. I should like to take this
opportunity to thank her for her precious comments on a draft of this article as well as for
putting some order into its language. I also thank Ian Proudfoot for his valuable
comments on data regarding time.
5
Tamat hari Sabtu jam pukul satu bulannya Muharam [SB Schoemann V 15].
 M A L A Y C O L O P H ON S 369
(waktu) tend to refer to the afternoon or night. Indeed, 22 out of the 34 hours
cited range from between seven and twelve o’clock in the morning, while the
waktu are the following: duha, lohor (twice), asar (twice), bakda asar, bakda
al-isya. The copyists show great care in the way they mention the hours, to
the extent that in seven cases even the halfhour is specified.
According to De´ roche (2000) a year without day and month is the type
of time information most commonly found in Arabic manuscripts. If this
statement is to be taken at face value, then the Malay tradition proves to be
quite different: a calculation based on the Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Leiden and
German collections (the British and Paris collections cannot be included as
the relevant catalogues note years only) shows that of 496 colophons
containing information on time, only 80 consist of a year alone, that is, 16%,
and this figure drops to 3% if we only consider the Leiden collection, the
catalogue of which is the most reliable of all.
In Arabic manuscripts, De´ roche also records (2000: 342) that the names
of the months are often followed by a conventional epithet (such as
- - -
Muharram al-hara m, Safar al-khayr, Rabi al-awwal al-sharı f, Rabi al-a khir
-
al-muba rak, etc.), and this custom can effectively be observed in Arabic
manuscripts copied in the Malay world. But in this regard, too, the Malay
tradition differs as no such epithets are used. 6
An interesting feature of dates is the discrepancy which sometimes
occurs between Muslim and Christian dates. 7 Such a discrepancy, ranging
from one to eighteen years, is found in eight manuscripts. Generally there is
no way of knowing which date is correct, but this is possible in the case of
two manuscripts and it transpires that the wrong year is the Muslim one. 8
6
Such an epithet is found in Munsyi Abdullah’s letter to E. Dulaurier in 1847, i.e. bulan
Syaban almukarram, even though in letters – just as in manuscripts – these epithets are
very rare (Gallop 1994: 173, 228).
7
A one-day difference between the two dates can be related to the hour of the day.
Manuscript [SB Schoemann V 12] for instance has both dates 26 Rajab 1264 and 27 Juni
1848, while according to Wustenfeld’s table 26 Rajab should be 28 June. But the
information in the manuscript is actually correct between sunset (maghrib) and midnight.
Other errors are merely due to the miswriting of one figure, such as 1275 for 1215 [RAS
Raffles Malay 9] or 1130 for 1230 [RAS Raffles Malay 58]. For a comprehensive
discussion of the various and highly complex causes of such discrepancies, see the recent
work by Ian Proudfoot (2006).
8
The first is PNRI BG 151 which mentions ‘22 Muharam 1266, 27 November 1850’; if
the Hijrah date were correct, the Christian one would be 8 December 1849 with the
consequence that all three elements of that date in the manuscript would be wrong. While
if the Christian date is correct, then the Hijrah date is 22 Muharam 1267, implying one
mistake only. The second example is LUB Cod.Or. 2009 with the mention of ‘Muharam
1255, 25 April 1838’; in the same way if the Hijrah date were correct, two or three
elements of the Christian date would be wrong, while if the Christian date is correct, only
one element of the Hijrah year is wrong.
370 I ND ON E S I A AN D T H E M A LA Y W O R L D
Another example occurs in the above-mentioned letter from Munsyi
Abdullah to E. Dulaurier9 which is dated ‘1 August 1847, 18 Syaban 1257’,
while the equivalent of 18 Syaban 1257 is actually 5 October 1841. Which
one is right, 1847 or 1841? In fact the letter has to date from 1847 as it
contains a reference to the text of the Hikayat Abdullah (which was
completed in 1843). Moreover 1 August 1847 is equivalent to 18 Syaban
1263, so that here too only one element of the Muslim date is wrong. But
how could such a knowledgeable, intellectual and devout Muslim as Munsyi
Abdullah be wrong about the Muslim date by six years?
The conclusion that may be drawn from these examples is rather strange.
Even though the date found in manuscripts (mostly dating from the 19th
century) is more commonly a Muslim rather than a Christian one, when a
copyist makes a mistake about one of them, he makes it in the Muslim year;
he knows the day and the month of the Muslim calender but not the year.
This observation is undoubtedly due to fact that in the early 19th century
there were many printed Christian calendars but no printed Muslim
calendars. Among eight such mistakes in our corpus, four pertain to the
1880s but the other four are earlier, starting in 1815. The place of copying is
unknown for all eight manuscripts but they all seem to come from Indonesia
– although Abdullah’s letter was written in Singapore. These examples
exemplify the way the Christian calender started replacing the Muslim one in
the Malay world during that period.
The day of the week is mentioned in 147 manuscripts and proves to occur
far more frequently in the religious category than in any other. What is
interesting here is the tendency of the copyists to complete their task on
certain days rather than others. The days of preference are in the following
order: Friday, Thursday, Wednesday, Monday, Saturday, Tuesday, Sunday,
and the difference between them is important: Friday appears twice as often
as Sunday.10 A similar tendency affects months: manuscripts containing
information about the Muslim month (292 in total) show that copyists often
completed their task in Rajab and Zulhijjah (perhaps these were partly
manuscripts copied in Mecca) and rarely in Ramadan or Syawal. 11

Information about place

From a literary point of view colophons reflect the presence of texts in

certain places; in other words, they tell us where certain texts were known
9
Published in facsimile and transcribed in Gallop 1994: 173, 228.
10
More precisely, Friday accounts for 21% of the total, Thursday 16%, Wednesday 16%,
Monday 14%, Saturday 13%, Tuesday 10%, and Sunday 10%.
11
The complete data is as follows: Muharam is mentioned 18 times, Safar 20, Rabi I 28,
Rabi II 27, Jumad I 18, Jumad II 24, Rajab 39, Syaban 28, Ramadan 15, Syawal 16,
Zulqaidah 28, Zulhijjah 31.
 M A L A Y C O L O P H ON S 371
and appreciated. From a codicological point of view, they testify to the
activity of copyists across the Malay world.
In Arabic manuscripts, according to De´ roche (2000: 340), ‘The place of
copying is more rarely mentioned [than that of the copyist]; when it appears
it frequently remains rather vague: the codicologist must often be content
with the name of a town and he only exceptionally discovers an indication of
the exact place where the work of transcription was completed.’ (Such a
place could be a school, a mosque or a house.) The first proposition in this
statement differs from the Malay tradition for, as mentioned above, place
names feature more often than copyists’ names (there are 239 place names
compared with 202 copyists’ names). But the second proposition holds true
for the Malay tradition as well: in Malay manuscripts places of copying
appear as names of towns or areas in towns. A unique exception is found in
BNF Mal.-pol. 278: ‘In the city of Singapore, in the Sumbawa area, at the
rear of the mosque of Enci’ Fatimah Riau’.
If we analyse the 239 place names, as might be expected we find cities
and regions famous in the world of Malay literature such as Malacca,
Singapore and Riau, but we also reach four interesting conclusions:
(1) the activity of copying took place throughout the Malay world, including
places
– such as Bukittinggi, Bengkulu, Cianjur, Cirebon, Semarang, Buleleng,
Gorontalo and Manado – whose names never occur in handbooks about
the development of Malay literature, and this is a reflection of the fact
that Malay literature was distributed, written and read in all areas where
Muslim people were living;
(2) on the other hand, several place names that we might expect to see do not
occur (we know that there was a lively literary scene in places like
Banjarmasin, Makassar and Bima among others, but these towns almost
never appear in colophons), perhaps because European collectors were
not active there;
(3) Batavia appears as the premier place for the production of Malay
manuscripts (accounting for 49 manuscripts, that is a fifth of the total of
239); this is partly due to the work of the General Secretariat established
by the Dutch government in 1820, but is also due to the dynamic nature
of local activity, free of any European influence, as reflected in the
lending libraries, the biggest and most numerous of which were found
precisely in Batavia;12
(4) Mecca was the second most productive city (34 manuscripts were copied
there, quite apart from the numerous texts composed there); we have to
12
However we have to keep in mind that some figures, and these ones particularly, may
be distorted by the specific reasons why some scribes may have been more inclined to
write colophons than others. In the case of Batavian scribes this may have been due to
European influence, and in the case of Mecca scribes due to Arabic influence.
372 I ND ON E S I A AN D T H E M A LA Y W O R L D
keep in mind that, in the category of religious texts, Mecca was the most
important place of production of Malay manuscripts, be they original
works or copies, a fact that is not properly recorded in handbooks on
Malay literature.

The copyists

Data about copyists is manifold. It is often limited to a simple name, but

several copyists mention their ethnic origin, for instance ‘the copyist is a
Bugis’ [PNRI Br. 126], or ‘a man of Balinese origin’ [PNRI C.St. 131]; a
copyist calls himself alternatively ‘Enci’ Sa’id, a man of Riau of Bugis
origin’ [LUB Cod.Or. 1718] and ‘Enci’ Sa’id, a Bugis born in Riau’ [LUB
Cod.Or. 2160]; another one introduces himself as ‘a man of Banjar origin in
Sungai Baru, not a Chinese, a Malay’ [LUB Cod.Or. 2095]; 13 a few others do
not mention their origin but they write notes in Javanese (e.g. PNRI BG 19,
LUB Cod.Or. 1695, LUB Cod.Or. 1973).
All (known) copyists with one exception are men, and most of them are
not professional scribes but laymen. In other words, most manuscripts were
not produced by learned and famous scribes but by ordinary people who only
produced one or two manuscripts each. In all cities there must actually have
been a group of professional scribes acting as secretaries or writers of letters,
contracts and all sort of reports for the benefit of uneducated people. 1415 Most
of these scribes however may never have been involved in literary activities,
and there were probably not that many of them. One of the most famous
copyists, Munsyi Abdullah, remarked how few people were able to write in
Malacca in about 1810: ‘People who could write and compose something in
Malacca at that time were extremely few; there were actually four or five
men employed in that trade.’18 He gives the names of six men who were good
at writing, five of whom were Indian and one Malay.
Data about copyists can be cumulative from one manuscript to another.
This is one reason among many to study colophons systematically, in order to
collect all possible information about the various copyists and their milieu.
One example is that of Muhammad Cing Saidullah who worked for a long
time at the Dutch General Secretariat in Batavia. There are 11 manuscripts
13
The relevant quotes are the following: Yang menyurat dia orang Bugis [PNRI Br. 126],
peranakan Bali [PNRI C.St. 131]; Enci’ Sa’id, orang Riau peranakan Bugis [LUB
Cod.Or. 1718], Enci’ Sa’id, peranakan Bugis di Riau [LUB Cod.Or. 2160], peranakan
Banjar di Sungai Baru, bukannya Cina anak Melayu [LUB Cod.Or. 2095].
14
As an example, some 100 legal requests addressed to the tribunal of Pontianak in the
1880s were written by several scribes, most of whom must have been professional (see
Chambert-Loir 1994:
15
). 18
Abdullah 1953: 40.
 M A L A Y C O L O P H ON S 373
signed by him in our corpus;16 seven are dated, all of them from the 1820s,
except one dated 1839. One of these manuscripts is in Latin characters.
Moreover, in one manuscript [LUB Cod.Or. 1942] he wrote his name in
Arabic, Latin and Javanese characters (as Muhammad Bakir would do as
well later). Six more manuscripts [BNF Mal.pol. 38, BNF Mal.-pol. 65, BNF
Mal.-pol. 76, Ryl. Malay 9, LUB Cod.Or. 1702, LUB Cod.Or. 1976] have
been identified as his work, albeit with some doubt as his handwriting is very
similar to that of some of his colleagues at the Secretariat, and in particular
one of them, Muhammad Hasan. In one of these six manuscripts [LUB
Cod.Or. 1976] he gives a list of 14 manuscripts belonging to him that he
intends to bequeath to his son. From other colophons we also learn that he
lived in Kampung Krukut and worked both at his place and at the
Secretariat’s office in Rijswijk. He owned two private seals with his name in
Arabic characters, one of them bearing also the letters MTSD (see Wieringa
1998: 23, 24). According to P. Voorhoeve (1964: 260-61) his name is once
written (in Latin characters) as ‘Luitnant Tjing Saiedoellah Mohd. Edries’,
while the Dutch government’s almanac for the years 1820–1827 mentions
one Mochamad Tjieng Naim Baktie Naija Widjaija as ‘Commandant of the
Western Javanese’. The two names differ, but it seems impossible that there
would have been two ‘lieutenant Muhammad Cing’ at the same time, so that
Voorhoeve’s conclusion is that our scribe, Muhammad Cing Saidullah, was
the head of the Sundanese community in Batavia in the 1820s.
Another scribe, who also worked for the Dutch, but this time in Tanjung
Pinang in Riau, is Enci’ Ismail ibn Datu’ Kerkun. At the end of the 1820s he
was working at the secretariat of the Resident of Riau, Lieutenant Colonel
Cornelis Elout. His name shows that his father was himself a clerk. In one
manuscript he adds the information that he is the secretary of Tengku Sa’id
Muhammad Zain ibn al-marhum al-Habib Abdurrahman al-Kudsi of Lingga.
There are in our corpus five manuscripts signed by him, and E. Wieringa has
identified one more. 17

The copying process

Several copyists give some information about the way they perform their
task, including, for example, about the manuscript they are using as a source.
Such data, which throws useful light on the time lapse between a source and
its copy, is found in nine manuscripts in our corpus, and I have found the
similar information in eight additional manuscripts. 18 The average time lapse
16
Namely, BNF Mal.-pol. 57, 58, 93, 101, 245; PNRI BG 146; LUB Cod.Or. 1401, 1696,
1716, 1942, 1964.
17
Namely, LUB Cod.Or. 1722 (2), 1723, 1724, 1726, 1736, 1725.
18
The first nine are SB Or. Fol. 408; PNRI BG 209, 77, 234; RAS Maxwell 1, 6, 17 (B),
20; and LUB Cod.Or. 1741 (1); the others are three manuscripts of Undang-Undang
374 I ND ON E S I A AN D T H E M A LA Y W O R L D
in these 17 manuscripts is 50 years. This figure is quite high and leads to two
remarks: firstly, the manuscripts used as sources were still readable after 50
years (sometimes even after 80 years or more) 19, a fact which goes against
the conventional assumption that, due to the tropical climate and a large array
of historical disasters, Malay manuscripts generally had a short life.
Secondly, the reason that those source manuscripts were so old was probably
because there were no later manuscripts available that could be copied.
This, therefore, is an indication of the scarcity of available manuscripts.
The first European scholars who paid attention to Malay literature
unanimously complained about the rarity of manuscripts. In 1726, in his
chapter on Malay literature, Valentijn managed to list only 23 titles, and
Werndly ten years later only 69 (see Mulyadi 1994: 26–33). We know what
difficulty Abdul Kadir, interpreter to the Dutch Resident in Riau, had in
collecting manuscripts in 1821, even though he was on an official mission
and had a large budget at his disposal (see Proudfoot 2003), and how
disappointed his own son, Munsyi Abdullah, was when he, in his turn, was
looking for manuscripts in Kelantan in 1838 (see Sweeney 2005: 137–38). In
the history of Malay literature there were no bookshops for centuries – so
said Werndly in 1736, but in fact his statement remained valid until the
middle of the 19th century, something which is certainly at variance with the
ancient manuscript market in the Arab and Persian worlds.
We have examples of manuscripts which were copied and distributed as
soon as they were composed. Sultan Iskandar Thani, for instance, ordered
Nuruddin al-Raniri to write the Sirat al-mustakim and immediately sent a
copy of the work to the Sultan of Kedah (Lombard 1967: 163). But this type
of example is rare: PNRI W 60 seems to have been copied the same year as it
was composed; in CUL Scott Lower Left 7, it is stated that the manuscript
was copied the very day the work was written, but Ricklefs and Voorhoeve
(1977: 120) think this is rather ‘improbable’. As a rule manuscripts were
seldom copied, and then only after a long while. We even have many
testimonies that certain manuscripts were forbidden to be copied or ordered
to be destroyed, to the point that voluntary destruction was one of the main
causes of the rarity of manuscripts. In the 1840s, Munsyi Abdullah criticised
the ‘stupidity’ of Muslim teachers in the Malay Peninsula who forbade the
use of hikayat because of their content: ‘And it is with such stupidity that
masters have ordered most manuscripts and hikayat of the old days to be
burned in many of the Malay states because of the lies and fantasies in them’
Melaka (see Liaw 1976), one of Hikayat Indraputra (Mulyadi 1983: 12), two of Hikayat
Muhammad Hanafiah (Brakel 1975, I: 77 and LUB Cod.Or. 6545, see Iskandar 1999),
and one of Hikayat Pandawa Lima (LUB Cod.Or. 6579; see Iskandar 1999). The time
lapse between source and copy in these 17 manuscripts is the following (in years): 81, 9,
46, 16, 58, 66, 61, 50, 31, 60, 59, 80, 80, 80, 29, 9, 33.
19
According to P. Voorhoeve, the manuscript LUB Cod.Or. 1694 dated 1835, was copied
from LUB Cod.Or. 1973, dated 1737, that is, 98 years earlier (see Wieringa 1998: 37).
 M A L A Y C O L O P H ON S 375
(Abdullah 1953: 376). We are reminded of the fanatical policy of Nuruddin
al-Raniri who caused religious tracts to be burned before the mosque Bait al-
Rahman in Banda Aceh20 and who forbade the copying and reading of
hikayat: ‘do not read useless hikayat, because they are full of harmful lies; it
is not permitted to write those hikayat; it would certainly cause your loss in
this world and the next, for hikayat [sung] with tambourines are clearly lies.
(...) These hikayat may not be kept inside houses, and whoever reads them is
an infidel’ (quoted from the Bustan al-Salatin by Mulyadi 1983: 24–25).
Data regarding source manuscripts also conveys information about the
way manuscripts used to circulate. Of ten manuscripts of Hikayat
Muhammad Hanafiah which bear a colophon, six were copied in Batavia, the
others in Kedah, Bengkulu, Riau and Tidore; five manuscripts of Hikayat
Indraputra were copied in Perak, Malacca, Singapore (two) and Pontianak
respectively; and of four manuscripts of Syair Perang Mengkasar three were
copied in Ambon. Lastly, among the manuscripts of Undang-Undang Melaka
one was copied in Singapore by a man from Bengkulu from a manuscript
belonging to an Arab from Jambi; three others were copied in Kedah from
manuscripts from Aceh; and yet another was copied by a man from Demak
from a manuscript belonging to a man from Naning. It was even occasionally
the case that the copying of a manuscript was started in one place and
finished in another. The first part of PNRI W 50, for instance, was copied in
Demak and the third part in Semarang ten days later, while BL Add. 12393
was copied on a boat sailing from Semarang to Palembang.
Data about source manuscripts is very scarce. LUB Cod.Or. 1718 is an
exception: its colophon explains that the text (Hikayat Ghulam) was
composed in Arabic by Tuan Habib Syeikh bin Alawi Saqaf, then translated
into Malay in Riau by a man from Siantan and subsequently copied again and
again in Riau by five copyists, the names of whom are all mentioned,
including the location of their tombs.
In several manuscripts the date of when the task of copying started is
mentioned. When both dates are mentioned – the beginning and the end of
the act of copying – we get to know how long it took to copy the whole
manuscript. It could be only a few days; it could also be quite a long time
(e.g. BNF Mal.-pol. 48, four months; LUB Cod.Or. 2014, seven months;
PNM MS 23, three years). There could be a long lapse of time between the
copying of two texts in one manuscript or between two volumes of a single
work, as in e.g. LUB Cod.Or. 1691, two and a half months; LUB Cod.Or.
2014, six and a half months; LUB Cod.Or. 1689, fifteen months; BL
MSS.Malay D.6, two years. The same data gives us an idea of the writing
speed of a copyist: in PNM MS 21, 30 pages were written in five days;
Muhammad Bakir, who made a living as an author and scribe, and who

20
See Al-Attas 1966: 15-16. Another reference is found in Hadi 2004: 155.
376 I ND ON E S I A AN D T H E M A LA Y W O R L D
produced thousands of pages, could write 400 pages in 25 days [PNRI BG
252] and 350 pages in 16 days [PNRI BG 183]. 21
Several copyists state that they were working on a commission from
someone. Numerous manuscripts were written to order for the Dutch General
Secretariat in Batavia (referred to as sektari in the manuscripts). Centres of
production of manuscripts are often linked to the persons of kings: Sultan
Mahmud Syah in Malacca around 1500, Sultan Iskandar Muda, Sultan
Iskandar Thani dan Sultanah Tajul Alam Safiatuddin in Aceh in the 17th
century (many religious manuscripts were written to their order, and famous
ulamas such as Syamsuddin, Nuruddin and Abdurrauf held positions at their
palaces), Sultan Badaruddin in Palembang at the beginning of the 19th
century (see Drewes’ study (1977) which, after almost 30 years, remains the
unique study of such a centre), Sultan Muhammad Idrus in Buton in the first
half of the 19th century, and Raja Ali Haji’s family in Riau in the middle of
the 19th century are all examples of this.
Another kind of data found in some colophons is related to the conditions
and the process of copying. Several copyists state that they have not changed
a word of the text they are copying for e.g. the copyist of LUB Cod.Or. 1761
(1) states four times that he is copying his source manuscript faithfully even
though it is incomplete, because he has been ordered to. Others on the
contrary improve their source for e.g. the copyist of LUB Cod.Or. 1702
declares: ‘what was unfitting has been modified’. Not infrequently, we can
observe that a manuscript has been written by two different hands. One
copyist explains why he had to ask a colleague for help: ‘If someone else’s
handwriting appears in this hikayat, it is because the person who
commissioned the copy asked me to complete it as fast as possible, this is
why I asked somebody’s help, and I took that liberty after asking permission
for it.’22
Some copyists mention the type of paper they are using. The copyist of
LUB Cod.Or. 2095 remarks that his paper is extremely thin (terlalu nipis)
and explains: ‘it is Chinese paper, not English’. More often copyists
complain about the price of paper: Muhammad Bakir had to buy small
amounts of paper, that is, just as much as he could afford each time, while the
copyist of PNRI Br. 3 was forced to stop working half way through because
he was short of paper.23
Many manuscripts were copied in order to be rented out. Muhammad
Bakir, owner of a lending library in Batavia in the second half of the 19th

21
See Chambert-Loir 1984: 53.
22
Adapun maka ada khat orang yang lainnya di dalam hikayat karena orang yang
menyuruh hamba ini hendak bersegera-segera lekas sudah, sebab itulah maka hamba
minta tolong kepada orang yang lain, itu pun dengan izinnya jua maka hamba berani
[LUB Cod.Or. 1718].
23
Syahadan tiada lagi saya bole ceriterakan perkataan ini karena habis dia punya naskah.
 M A L A Y C O L O P H ON S 377
century, used to write a catchword at the end of every quire of his
manuscripts and to set his signature in many places as he was afraid that his
manuscripts might come apart and be returned incomplete. It may be for the
same reason that another copyist felt the need to mention the number of
pages and lines in a manuscript he had just finished copying e.g. ‘This
manuscript is made up of 6 leaves and 2761 lines’ [SB Schoemann V 10 (B)]
and another one mentioned the number of leaves and quires e.g. ‘there are 70
leaves and 8 quires’ [SB Schoemann V 20].
Lending libraries were found in at least five cities, namely Malacca,
Palembang, Batavia, Banjarmasin, and Semarang. In Batavia (see Iskandar
1981), these libraries were scattered across the city during the 19th century.
The manuscript owners often had only one or two manuscripts; one however
had 14, and the head (wijkmeester) of Kampung Pluit, a man from Sumbawa,
was known for owning most of the manuscripts in the area. Several owners
were women who earned a living through the renting out of their
manuscripts. The handwriting of the manuscripts was often clumsy because
the copyists lacked education. The main collection was the property of the
Fadli family and was run by three of its members from 1858 to 1909. We
know 77 texts that they had for rent at one time or another, 43 of which are
kept today in various public libraries. 24 In the middle of the 19th century the
renting fee was between 10 and 15 cents a night. The customers, that is the
people who rented and listened to the reading of these manuscripts, were
Indonesians, Chinese and Eurasians.
In Palembang the only example we know is a collection of seven
manuscripts bought by Hans Overbeck in the 1920s; two among them end
with a colophon in the form of a syair dated 1866 (see Kratz 1977, 1980). 25 In
Banjarmasin at the beginning of the 20th century a Chinese man named
Babah Badak owned a collection of manuscripts that he had copied himself
with the aim of renting them out, but his trade became less and less profitable
because the local population was losing interest in the old tales, so that he
finally sold his collection to W. Kern in 1938 (see Kern 1948: 544). As for
Semarang, the only testimony left of a lending library is a manuscript
(Hikayat Raja Handak and Hikayat Raja Pasai) copied in 1797 which used to
be lent to Malay, Makassar and Chinese customers (see Kratz 1989).
Regarding Malacca too we only have one manuscript left [BNF Mal.-pol.
266]; it was copied by one Syeikh Muhammad Mir Ali in 1848 for renting
out. Most of the data about these rented manuscripts, their owners, their times
and their backgrounds can be found in the colophons.
Many Malay manuscripts changed hands as a result of being given away,
bequeathed, sold or lent, and in fact, many manuscripts contain personal

24
See Chambert-Loir 1984, 1991.
25
Titik Pudjiastuti’s contribution to this issue actually records another manuscript
formerly belonging to a Palembang lending library.
378 I ND ON E S I A AN D T H E M A LA Y W O R L D
notes, including information on their owners. These were usually laymen
known only through their names, but the relevant notes give an insight into
the life of the manuscripts. For instance, a police sergeant-major in Singapore
owned two manuscripts, CUL Add 3756 and CUL Add 3761 in the 1890s; in
Singapore too, 20 years earlier, a man from Malacca by the name of Enci
Muhammad bin Haji Abdulfattah, who worked as a police clerk, owned 12
manuscripts copied between 1829 and 1877. 26 We have seen above that in
Batavia in the 1820s, another man, probably none other than Muhammad
Cing Saidullah, owned 14 manuscripts.

Conclusion

These are examples of the various benefits we can gain from colophons. In
spite of the plethora of names and dates that have had to be quoted, this
survey is far from complete. One last example will suffice to show this, i.e.
the colophon of LUB Cod.Or. 1694, a copy of Bab VI of the Bustan al-
Salatin, which reads as follows: ‘This text has been finished well and safely
on the 25th of July 1835 and in the year of the emigration of the Prophet
(God bless him and grant him salvation!) 1251, on the 30th of Rabiulawal, a
Saturday at one o’clock in the afternoon. The person who wrote this Hikayat
Bunga Rampai is me, the humble Ramli ibn Abdullah whose place of origin
is Batavia.’27
This colophon occupies six full lines; two small designs in the shape of
intertwined circles are drawn to the left and right of the last line. The
handwriting is elegant (we do not know of a single other manuscript written
by this Ramli); several words are written in large bold letters. This colophon
is almost complete, but it does not mention the source manuscript which,
according to P. Voorhoeve may have been LUB Cod.Or. 1973, dated 1737,
that is 98 years earlier; moreover, the correspondence between the two dates
mentioned in the colophon is wrong by one day. There are still more features
in this colophon that have not been touched upon above, namely its shape
(not a triangle here but full lines), the use of vowel signs (just on the first four
words), the use of bold letters, the presence of decorative elements, the use of
letters and figures in the dates, the mention of the Christian year before the
Muslim one, the error in the title of the book – not Bunga Rampai but Bustan
al-Salatin – and the use of Arabic phrases. As the Malay saying goes, this
topic ‘needs further research’.

26
That is, Bod. Malay c. 5 and RAS Maxwell 23, 26, 58, 59, 60, 63, 76, 81, 82, 87, 97].
27
The original phrasing is particularly important in this case: Tamat al-kalam bi al-khair
wa al-salam kepada 25 hari bulan Juli tahun 1835 dan kepada hijrat al-Nabi sam 1251
pada 30 hari bulan Rabiulawal pada hari Sabtu waktu jam pukul satu lohor adanya.
Adapun yang menyurat Hikayat Bunga Rampai ini hamba yang daif Ramli ibn Abdullah
wa asalhi walad Betawi jua adanya.
 M A L A Y C O L O P H ON S 379
Manuscript sources, with a list of the abbreviations used for libraries and a
note of the catalogues consulted

BL – British Library, London (including the India Office Library) (Ricklefs

& Voorhoeve 1977)
Add. 12393. Hikayat Raja Babi
MSS.Malay D.6 (IO 2672). Syair Jaran Tamasa; Hikayat Parang Puting
BNF – Bibliothe`que Nationale de France, Paris (Voorhoeve 1973 and
Katalog
Manuskrip Melayu di Perancis 1991)
Mal.-pol. 38. Undang-Undang Melaka; Hukum Laut; Kisah Raja Nusyirwan
Adil; etc.
Mal.-pol. 48. Hikayat Muhammad Hanafiah
Mal.-pol. 57. Hikayat Ali Padisyah
Mal.-pol. 58. Hikayat Mi‘raj Muhammad
Mal.-pol. 65. Hikayat Abu Samah
Mal.-pol. 76. Hikayat Bayan Budiman
Mal.-pol. 93. Hikayat Kalilah dan Daminah
Mal.-pol. 101. Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain
Mal.-pol. 103 III, IV. Syair segala huruf berkata-kata; Pantun
Mal.-pol. 245. Syair burung; Syair huruf berkata-kata; Syair ikan; etc.
Mal.-pol. 266. Hikayat Syah Firman; Hikayat Amir Arab; Hikayat ikan
Mal.-pol. 278. Syair Haris Fadilah

Bod. – Bodleian Library, Oxford University (Ricklefs & Voorhoeve 1977)

Malay c. 5. Sejarah Kedah

CUL – Cambridge University Library (Ricklefs & Voorhoeve 1977)

Add 3756. Hikayat Maharaja Sri Rama
Add 3761. Hikayat Indraputra
Or. 193. Sifr al-khalıˆqa
Scott Lower Left 7. Idaˆ h al-albaˆ b li murıˆd al-nikaˆ h bi al-sawaˆ b
LUB – Leiden University Library (Wieringa 1998; except for the last two
manuscripts described in Iskandar 1999)
Cod.Or. 1401. Hikayat Puspa Wiraja
Cod.Or. 1689. Hikayat Sri Rama
Cod.Or. 1691. Hikayat Tuan Putri Johan Manikam; Hikayat Bulan Berbelah
Cod.Or. 1694. Bustan al-Salatin, Bab VI
Cod.Or. 1695. Kitab Tabir
Cod.Or. 1696. Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain
Cod.Or. 1702. Hikayat Banjar
Cod.Or. 1716. Sejarah Melayu
380 I ND ON E S I A AN D T H E M A LA Y W O R L D
Cod.Or. 1718. Hikayat Ghulam
Cod.Or. 1722 (2). Undang-Undang Melaka
Cod.Or. 1723. Hikayat Ghulam
Cod.Or. 1724. Hikayat Mareskalek
Cod.Or. 1725. Undang-Undang Melaka
Cod.Or. 1726. Undang-Undang Melaka; Kitab Fiqh; Kitab Tarasul
Cod.Or. 1727. Hikayat Tuan Putri Jauhar Manikam
Cod.Or. 1736. Sejarah Melayu
Cod.Or. 1741 (1). Aturan Setia Bugis dengan Melayu
Cod.Or. 1761 (1). Syair Perang Johor
Cod.Or. 1942. Syair Bidasari
Cod.Or. 1955. Syair Raja Mambang Jauhari
Cod.Or. 1964. Syair Bidasari
Cod.Or. 1973. Bustan al-Salatin
Cod.Or. 1976. Hikayat Berma Syahdan
Cod.Or. 2009. Hikayat Raja Jumjumah
Cod.Or. 2014. Kaba Cindur Mato
Cod.Or. 2095. Syair Hemop
Cod.Or. 2160. Undang-Undang Negeri dan Pelayaran; Kitab Tarasul
Cod.Or. 6545. Hikayat Muhammad Hanafiah
Cod.Or. 6579. Hikayat Pandawa Lima
PNM – Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia (National Library of Malaysia), Kuala
Lumpur (Manuskrip Melayu Koleksi Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia
1987)
MS 21. Fath al-manaˆ n li safwat al-zubad; Mudhaˆkarat al-ikhwaˆn
MS 23. Hukum Kanun Melaka
PNRI – Perpustakaan Nasional Republik Indonesia (National Library of
Indonesia), Jakarta (Van Ronkel 1909)
Br. 3. Ht Pandawa Lima
Br. 126. Hikayat Panji Kuda Sumirang
BG 19. Hikayat Seribu Masalah
BG 77. Hikayat Nakhoda Muda
BG 146. Hikayat Abu Samah
BG 151. Hikayat Muhammad Mukabil
BG 183. Hikayat Sultan Taburat, jil. III
BG 209. Serat Kanda
BG 234. Sejarah Pasemah dalam huruf Latin
BG 245. Hikayat Indra Bangsawan
BG 252. Hikayat Sri Rama
C.St. 131. Hikayat Indranata
 M A L A Y C O L O P H ON S 381
W 50. Undang-Undang Johor
W 60. Undang-Undang Adat
RAS – Royal Asiatic Society, London (Ricklefs & Voorhoeve 1977)
Raffles Malay 9. Hikayat Indraputra
Raffles Malay 58. Hikayat Raja Syah Johan Indra Mengindra
Maxwell 1. Hikayat Indraputra
Maxwell 6. Undang-Undang Melaka; etc.
Maxwell 17 (B). Undang-Undang Pahang
Maxwell 20. Undang-Undang; Ceritera Raja Nusyirwan Adil
Maxwell 23. Surat al-anbiya
Maxwell 26. Sejarah Melayu
Maxwell 58. Beberapa syair
Maxwell 59. Hikayat Serangga Bayu
Maxwell 60. Adat Segala Raja-Raja Melayu
Maxwell 63. Syair agama
Maxwell 76. Hikayat Syahi Mardan
Maxwell 81. Hikayat Maharaja Ali
Maxwell 82. Syair Silindung Delima
Maxwell 87. Idaˆ h al-albaˆ b li murıˆd al-nikaˆ h bi al-sawaˆ b
Maxwell 97. Hikayat Nabi Mi‘raj
Ryl. – John Rylands University Library, Manchester (Ricklefs & Voorhoeve
1977)
Malay 9. Hikayat Jauhar Manikam
SB – Staatsbibliotheek, Berlin (Katalog manuskrip Melayu di Jerman Barat
1992)
Schoemann V 10 (B). Hikayat Kerasana
Schoemann V 12. Taj al-Salatin
Schoemann V 15. Hikayat Inderanata
Schoemann V 20. Hikayat Semaun
Schoemann V 27. Bunga Rampai
Or. Fol. 408. Undang-Undang Kedah

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