The inscriptions of Purnavarman, king of Taruma in western Java

Five of the stones were found near Bogor — at Ciaruteun, Kebon Kopi, Jambu, Pasir Awi and Muara Cianten — one at Tugu in North Jakarta and one, in 1947, at Cidanghiang in the far west of the island. The Ciaruteun inscription, reported in 1863, is a single verse beside a pair of carved footprints: ‘these two footprints, like those of Vishnu, are of the valiant lord of the earth, the illustrious Purnavarman, king of the city of Taruma’. The footprints at Kebon Kopi are those of his elephant, likened to Airavata, the elephant of Indra, and the Jambu inscription praises the king’s armour, which the arrows of his many enemies could not pierce. The longest text, from Tugu, records that in the 22nd year of his reign the king had the channel of the Gomati dug, 6,122 dhanu (‘bows’) long, in 21 days, and that the Brahmins received a thousand cows. Two of the seven, at Pasir Awi and Muara Cianten, bear only undeciphered ‘shell script’ signs, at Pasir Awi beside a pair of footprints.

The texts show a ruler who took Indian royal titles, followed Brahmanic rites and compared himself with Vishnu; the channels bear the names of North Indian rivers, the Chandrabhaga and the Gomati, and the name Taruma survives in that of the Citarum River. George Coedès took the Gomati works for irrigation; F. D. K. Bosch read the Tugu text as largely symbolic, a view rejected by J. Noorduyn and H. Th. Verstappen. The inscriptions are undated, and estimates of their script vary: Coedès placed it around 450, a little later than that of Mulavarman’s inscriptions in Borneo, and A. O. Zakharov assigns the texts to the second half of the 5th century, while more recent studies lean later — the DHARMA corpus edition by Arlo Griffiths and Emmanuel Francis dates the Tugu inscription to about the 6th century, and Elizabeth Cecil places the whole group in the 5th or 6th. Nothing else about Purnavarman is reliably known: the reign dates and the genealogy of Taruma given in some modern works come from the Wangsakerta manuscripts, which historians generally reject as a late forgery.