Srivijaya’s first conquests and its Old Malay inscriptions

The Kedukan Bukit stone, found in 1920 on the Tatang, a tributary of the Musi near Palembang, records in Old Malay, written in a South Indian (Pallava) script, that in the Shaka year 605, in the month Vaishakha, the ‘divine lord’ (dapunta hiyang) took to his boats to obtain siddhayatra — ‘magical power’ in George Coedès’s reading, ‘a successful journey’ in another — and then set out from Minanga Tamwan, a place still unidentified, leading twenty thousand men, some by boat and 1,312 on foot, and ‘made a settlement’; it ends: ‘Srivijaya — victory, siddhayatra, abundance for ever’. Where the new centre lay is disputed: Coedès and Pierre-Yves Manguin placed it at Palembang, while others argue for Jambi. The Talang Tuo inscription of 684, found at the foot of Bukit Seguntang in Palembang, records that the lord Sri Jayanasa laid out the Shrikshetra park with fruit trees, dams and ponds for the benefit of all beings; its vows — the thought of enlightenment, the Three Jewels, supreme awakening — are those of Mahayana Buddhism.

Two inscriptions of 686, at Kota Kapur on the island of Bangka and at Karang Brahi in the interior of Sumatra, curse anyone who rebels against or betrays the kadatuan (royal seat) of Srivijaya or the datu (chiefs) its king has appointed; the Kota Kapur text adds that it was carved when ‘the army of Srivijaya had just set out against the land of Java, which does not submit to Srivijaya’. Together with the early Cham inscriptions, these are the oldest known texts in any Malayo-Polynesian language. Which ‘Java’ was meant is debated: D. G. E. Hall thought of Taruma in western Java, while Waruno Mahdi saw both expeditions as campaigns against Malayu in the Batang Hari basin — and Yijing indeed notes that Malayu, a separate country when he stayed there in 672, had since become part of Srivijaya. The Kota Kapur stone, found in 1892, was the first to reveal the name, which H. Kern at first took for a king’s; in 1918 Coedès identified Srivijaya as a kingdom.