Akar Nusa
In a river village in Terengganu, floodwater drops after a heavy rain. A grey slab lies half hidden among the roots on the bank. Its four faces are covered with careful writing. Nobody in the village yet knows it will end up one of the most studied stones in the Malay world.
The story
The Terengganu Inscription Stone, in Malay Batu Bersurat Terengganu, was found in 1887 on the bank of the Tersat River at Kampung Buluh in Kuala Berang. It is a granite column, less than 90 cm tall, and it weighs 214.8 kg. All four faces carry writing.
The writing is in Malay, written in Jawi. Jawi is the Malay language written with letters based on the Arabic alphabet. UNESCO describes the stone as the earliest evidence of Jawi writing in the Malay Muslim world of Southeast Asia.
What does it say? It is a proclamation from a Terengganu ruler called Seri Paduka Tuan. He urges people to hold to Islam, and it sets out 10 basic rules of law. It also has some Sanskrit words, a reminder that Sanskrit was already part of the Malay world's language. The stone is evidence of Islam spreading along the trade routes, as a UNESCO story says.
When was it written? The year is on the stone but it is damaged. It reads either 702 AH or 789 AH. In the Gregorian calendar these are 1303 or 1387. The scholar C.O. Blagden leaned towards the later date. In 1970 Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas argued for the earlier one, specifically Friday, 4 Rajab 702 AH, or 22 February 1303. Scholars still discuss it, so this page gives both.
The stone has also travelled. For some decades from 1923 it was kept at the Raffles Museum in Singapore, until 1960. Then it was at the National Museum of Malaysia. It went back to Terengganu in 1991. In 2009 it was added to UNESCO's Memory of the World International Register, Malaysia's fourth listing. The programme exists to protect documents and records that are of world interest.
Where you can still see it today
- Terengganu State Museum, where the stone is kept.
- Kampung Buluh, Kuala Berang, where it was found.
- In Malay writing. Jawi is the script of the stone, and the script is still known today.
What DNA can tell, and what it cannot
This story belongs to writing, not to DNA. A stone cannot tell us who anybody's ancestors were, and a language or script is learned, not inherited. People of many backgrounds learned Malay and Jawi over the centuries.
DNA does not decide race, religion or bumiputera status. Your mother line, father line and region estimate tell their own stories about family movements. They say nothing about which script an ancestor used or what faith they held.
