The Keeper of Ancient Plates


 

You know how it is with stories about old things. The really old things. The kind that have been touched by so many hands that you can almost feel the weight of time itself pressing down on them, like the air before a summer storm in a backwoods town off Route 66. This is that kind of tale.

In the belly of the 19th century, when America was tearing itself apart in a Civil War and most folks around here still thought the world was flat as a pancake on Sunday morning, there lived a farmer on the outskirts of a place called Bekasi. Kebantenan, they called it. Sounds exotic, doesn’t it? Like something you’d find scrawled in one of those leather-bound journals hidden in some professor’s attic at Yale University.

(I shit you not, this actually happened.)

This farmer—nobody bothered to write down his name, poor bastard—kept something in his ramshackle house that would’ve made any museum curator cream their khakis: four metal plates inscribed with ancient Sundanese script. The kind of thing Indiana Jones would kill for. The kind of thing that, in the wrong hands, might just kill you.

The farmer didn’t have a goddamn clue what those metal plates said. Not a single blessed word. In the Notulen van de Algemeene en Directie-vergaderingen van het Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen (try saying that three times fast after a few shots of Jack), they wrote that he just hung those plates up in his house. Like you might hang a picture of Jesus or a faded photograph of your dead grandma. A talisman to ward off evil—which, if you’ve lived as long as I have, you know never quite works the way you hope.

Word travels, even in places where people still shit in holes and die of things we cure with a pill nowadays. Eventually, this little curiosity reached the ears of Raden Saleh, a hotshot Indonesian artist. You probably never heard of him, but he painted this famous piece called The Arrest of Pangeran Diponegoro—think of him as the Norman Rockwell of Indonesia, only with a hell of a lot more tragedy in his brush strokes.

Saleh wasn’t stupid. He knew treasure when he heard about it. So he hauled ass straight to that farmer’s door, wallet fat and ready. But here’s where it gets interesting—the farmer wouldn’t sell. Not for any price. In that way country folk have about things that belonged to their great-granddaddy, he said it was taboo to sell items from his ancestors.

(Taboo. Remember that word. It’s important in stories like this one.)

Two years crawled by, slow as cancer, and then Saleh got wind that the plates had somehow fallen into the hands of a man with a name like something out of a Charles Dickens novel: E.R.J. de Kuyper, the Assistant Resident of Meester-Cornelis (now called Jatinegara, but that’s neither here nor there). According to the records—and ain’t it funny how records can lie without saying a single untrue thing—de Kuyper bought those plates because some smooth-talking son of a bitch convinced him they were proof of land ownership for a place called Cipamingkis.

(They weren’t. They were something else entirely. Something older. Something darker.)

Eventually, Saleh got his hands on those plates. Kept them until he died, when they found their way to the Bataviaasch Genootschap, which is now the National Museum. Museums are funny places, aren’t they? Filled with dead things that aren’t quite dead. Things that watch you from behind glass cases when the lights go down and the night watchman is nodding off in his chair.

Those four copper plates became known as the Kebantenan Inscriptions. Each one covered with four to eight lines of script that looked like chicken scratch to most folks but contained secrets older than the hills. The kind of secrets that sleep, but never die.

A fella named K.F. Holle was the first poor bastard to read them. I bet he had nightmares afterward, the kind that wake you up at three in the morning with your heart trying to punch its way out of your chest. The problem was, by the time Holle got his scholarly mitts on them, the engravings were faint as whispers, the surface weathered by time and God knows what else.

Fast forward to 2021—Christ, doesn’t time fly when you’re not paying attention?—and two more scholars, Aditia Gunawan and Arlo Griffiths, took another crack at deciphering these metal mysteries. According to them (and who am I to argue?), those inscriptions dated back to the 15th century. A missing link between other ancient writings found in places with names like Kawali and Batu Tulis. Names that sound like incantations if you say them right.

Here’s where the hair on the back of your neck should start to rise, just a little.

The inscriptions mentioned a king: Sri Baduga Maharaja Ratu Haji di Pakwan Pajajaran. Quite a mouthful, ain’t it? According to another scholar, Saleh Danasasmita (no relation to our art collector friend), this king was none other than the legendary King Siliwangi, revered by the Sundanese people like Arthur is by the Brits or Elvis by Americans. A figure somewhere between history and myth, ruling somewhere between the 14th and 15th centuries.

And what did these inscriptions say? What message echoed across six hundred goddamn years to reach us?

Two royal decrees—piteket, they called them. First, that Sri Baduga’s grandfather, a man with the imposing name of Niskala Wastu Kancana, had passed down an edict through the generations: the sacred areas of Sundasembawa and Jayagiri were exempt from taxes. Holy ground, you might say. The kind of place where the veil between worlds grows thin at certain times of the year.

The second decree, maybe issued later, gave detailed boundaries for these sacred areas. Places with names that sound like secrets whispered in the dark: Munjul, Cibakengkeng, Cihonje, Cimuncang. Can you feel the weight of those names on your tongue? Try saying them aloud, I dare you.

And why did the king grant these special privileges? Because—and I want you to pay attention to this part—he loved the wiku. The hermit priests who studied religious knowledge. Kenai heman i viku pun, the inscription said. He loved the holy men who knew things ordinary folks weren’t supposed to know.

(Always be wary of holy men who know too much, that’s what my daddy used to say.)

The inscriptions also contained a genealogy of Sundanese kings, proving the validity of an old manuscript called Carita Parahyangan. According to this family tree, Sri Baduga was the son of the king of Galuh, a man called Dewa Niskala—or Ningrat Kancana in the inscriptions—who made the grave mistake of marrying a forbidden woman. A betrothed girl. The kind of sin that echoes through generations.

But the most fascinating bits were about the taxes themselves. Like peering through a keyhole into the daily life of ancient Sunda. There was the calagara tax on marriages—because governments have always found a way to make you pay for falling in love. The dongdang tax on rice production—dongdang being a container for carrying food or gifts during special events, something that evolved from necessity to tradition, the way most traditions do.

And a tax on cotton. Think about that. Cloth production so important that the state kept its thumb firmly on the scale. The tax collectors came from the estuary areas, suggesting a system adapted to the geography of the land. As if the river itself dictated how power flowed, from upstream to downstream, an economic-political system that mirrored the very water they depended on.

It makes you wonder, doesn’t it? About the things we build our lives around. The systems we create. The powers we bow to. And what those copper plates might really say, in the dead of night, when there’s no one around to hear them whisper their ancient secrets.

I’ve told you this story as true as I know how. But here’s the thing about old stories, about artifacts that survive when everything around them has crumbled to dust: they’re patient. They wait. And sometimes, just sometimes, they find ways to make themselves heard again.

Sleep tight, Constant Reader. And maybe check under your bed before you turn out the light.

Comments