The earliest known evidence for written literature in the history of the Philippines, the Laguna Copperplate Inscription is a sheet of copper metal with ancient writing discovered in the province of Laguna in 1989. It was found by a dredger working near the mouth of the Lumbang River emptying out into Laguna de Bay.
From there the plate made its way to the National Museum of the Philippines, where the Dutch anthropologist Antoon Postma recognised the writing on the plate as being akin to Kawi, an ancient Javanese script. This allowed him to translate the text on the plate, the findings of which he published in 1992. One of the findings was that—luckily—it was very explicitly dated to the 21st of April, 900 C.E.. The text was hammered out onto the copper sheet in Old Kawi script, but the language appears to be in Old Malay, with substantial elements of Sanskrit, Old Javanese and Old Tagalog mixed in, making the entirety sound like an early case of code-switching.
The document is essentially a royal debt pardon, issued by the Kingdom of Tondo ("Tundun"), officially releasing the heirs of the late Namwaran from a debt in gold amounting to a rough equivalent of 926 grams.
Tondo, based on the north bank of the Pasig River delta, where it empties into Manila Bay. Today it survives as a mere electoral district of the city of Manilanote —and is both a poverty-stricken Wretched Hive and a notorious Gangster Land to boot. How the Mighty Have Fallen, indeed.
- Still, Tondo was by no means the most powerful entity mentioned by name, as its leader invokes the authority of successively higher rulers across the region, suspected either to be elsewhere in Luzon, the Visayas to the south, or as far south as Java and Medang
To this day, the copperplate remains as part of the permanent exhibit of the National Museum of Anthropology
, a subdivision of the National Museum Complex in the City of Manila.
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Relevant Tropes:
- East Indies: The pre-Philippine cultures suggested and mentioned in the plate paint a picture similar to the rest of the precolonial kingdoms across maritime Southeast Asia.
- Everyone Has Standards: There is no context in the plate to suggest that the ruler of Tondo could be considered force Namwaran's children to pay their now dead father's debts.
- Averted with the chief of Tondo, who magnanimously forgives the late Namwaran's debts by not passing them on to his family, although the plate doesn't specify how Namwaran got into debt in the first place (and whether his creditors didn't try to pursue him in life).
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