The Bugis Chronicle of Bone

THE BUGIS CHRONICLE OF BONE THE BUGIS CHRONICLE OF BONE TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY CAMPBELL MACKNIGHT, MUKHLIS PAENI AND MUHLIS HADRAWI Published by ANU Press The Australian National University Acton ACT 2601, Australia Email: [email protected] Available to download for free at press.anu.edu.au ISBN (print): 9781760463571 ISBN (online): 9781760463588 WorldCat (print): 1140933926 WorldCat (online): 1140933873 DOI: 10.22459/BCB.2020 This title is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). The full licence terms are available at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode Cover design and layout by ANU Press. Cover image: The rice fields of Bone display the agricultural basis of the kingdom, while the lontar palms provided the original medium for Bugis writing (photograph by Campbell Macknight). The sword, La Téariduni, an item in the regalia of Bone, indicates military might. The chronicle records its name being used to represent the kingdom in a treaty from the middle of the sixteenth century (image from Perelaer 1872, vol. 2, plate 1). This edition © 2020 ANU Press Contents Figures, maps and plates vii Acknowledgements ix Preface xi Introduction 1 1. The Chronicle of Bone in Bugis historiography 1 2. The definition of the work 5 3. The manuscript 6 4. The choice of this version of the work 7 5. Principles of transcription 10 6. Principles of translation 13 7. The nature of the work 14 8. The date of the work and the problem of the end 21 9. Early Western-language comment on the events of the chronicle 26 10. Previous editions and published translations of the chronicle 30 11. Commentary on the chronicle 32 Appendix 1: Other manuscript versions of the chronicle 57 Appendix 2: Absolute reign dates 69 Appendix 3: Placenames in the chronicle 73 The Bugis Chronicle of Bone: English text 77 The Bugis Chronicle of Bone: Bugis text 109 Bibliography 137 Index 145 Figures, maps and plates Figures Figure 1 The genealogy of the early rulers 35 Figure 2 The descendants of Wé Benrigau’, Makkalempié 39 Figure 3 The descent and siblings of La Tenritatta, Arung Palakka, as described in the chronicle 50 Maps Map 1 South Sulawesi 37 Map 2 The early expansion of Bone 38 Map 3 Bone and its immediate neighbours 42 Plates Plate 1 The first page of the chronicle text as found in manuscript NBG 101 in the Leiden University Libraries 54 Plate 2 The second page of the chronicle as found in manuscript NBG 101 in the Leiden University Libraries 55 vii Acknowledgements The completion of this project has been unreasonably delayed. In 1975, in Leiden on study leave from The Australian National University, Campbell Macknight began to translate the version of the chronicle published by Matthes in his Boegineesche Chrestomathie (1864–72). This was at the suggestion and under the close supervision of the late Koos Noorduyn. Macknight gratefully acknowledges this assistance and all the help so freely offered by the Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies) and the Leiden University Library in the course of his repeated visits to Leiden. Jan Witkam in the past and Doris Jedamski more recently, together with their staff, have made working in the library’s manuscript reading room a delight. The library has also supplied the images for Plates 1 and 2. On a visit to Bone in 1978, Macknight was greatly helped by A. Muh. Ali Petta Nompo and other friends. At the end of 1980, Mukhlis Paeni spent two months as a visiting fellow in the Department of History, Faculty of Arts, at The Australian National University in Canberra on a grant from the Australian Research Grants Committee. He and Macknight worked carefully through the Bugis transcription and English translation and it was at this time that we took the decision to focus on the NBG 101 version of the work. A first version of the Bugis transcription and translation was typed up. It is this version of the translation that has circulated among interested friends and has been much quoted in publications as Macknight and Mukhlis (forthcoming). We owe much to Shirley Bradley and Barbara Hutchison in the Department of History for their help at this time. ix THE BUGIS CHRONICLE OF BONE In the following years, Macknight used the translation in undergraduate teaching both at The Australian National University and at the University of Tasmania, as well as giving various seminars and conference papers on aspects of the work. Several key questions about the chronicle were addressed in articles, as detailed in the Introduction to the present volume. Macknight thanks all those students, discussants and editors who have helped to clarify and sharpen arguments. In particular, he is grateful for the long association with Ian Caldwell, first as a postgraduate student and then as friend, in the task of developing meaningful principles for Bugis philology. Others who have helped in various ways over the years include David Bulbeck, Bill Cummings, Stephen Druce, Assa Doron, Elizabeth Macknight, the late Christian Pelras and the late Amin Sweeney. In 2017, Muhlis Hadrawi came to the Department of Anthropology, School of Culture, History and Language, College of Asia and the Pacific, at The Australian National University as a visiting fellow. He revised the Bugis transcription and helped with the description of manuscripts. For help in submitting the book to ANU Press, we are grateful to Jim Fox and, for eagle-eyed editing, to Jan Borrie. x Preface The Bugis and Makasar historiography from South Sulawesi in Indonesia is a remarkable and highly distinctive tradition. Its major works from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries allow us to understand how people of that time viewed the previous three centuries or so of their own past. These are not accounts by outsiders, such as we have from fragmentary Chinese records or travel narratives of European traders, but considered histories drawing on sources produced by the society itself. The Bugis Chronicle of Bone is a major work within this tradition. It was written in the late seventeenth century—perhaps, as suggested later, in or soon after 1672—and has been widely known in South Sulawesi since then. There are many manuscript copies of the work. Some of the information in the chronicle has found its way into the scholarly literature on South Sulawesi and the text has been published several times in either Bugis script or transcription. There are also some whole or partial translations into Indonesian and Dutch. This is, however, the first edition to provide a reliable transcription of the Bugis text, a complete English translation and a discussion of various philological and historical issues. Two general matters deserve comment. The Bone chronicle fits clearly into the genre of works described as ‘genealogical narrative texts’ by Teeuw (1984) in his attempt to discern Indonesia as a ‘field of literary study’. Within this genre, he discusses the Balinese Babad Buleleng, the Javanese Babad Tanah Jawi and Pararaton, the Malay Sejarah Melayu, Hikayat Patani, Hikayat Raja-Raja Pasai, Hikayat Aceh and Hikayat Banjar dan Kotawaringin; his only Bugis example is an eighteenth-century chronicle from Wajo. Most of the features of these texts that Teeuw sees as common across the genre can be found in the chronicle of Bone, such as the important role of genealogy and the determination of status, especially in the succession of rulers; the linkage xi THE BUGIS CHRONICLE OF BONE between narrative and particular rulers; the supernatural elements in the origin of rule; and the ‘open ending’ of the work. Undoubtedly, he would have included both the Bone chronicle and the Makasar chronicles of Gowa and Tallo had satisfactory editions been available to him. As works of history and sources about the past, the South Sulawesi examples can certainly stand with these products of other Southeast Asian traditions. Yet within the genre, the Bugis and Makasar works have a distinct tone. They display a directness that makes it easy to assume they are giving a ‘realistic’ view of the past, though, as will be shown later, there is rather more to be said about this in relation to the Bone chronicle. While there are certainly some supernatural events in the early stages of this narrative, as is common with other South Sulawesi historical traditions, such material serves a clear purpose in justifying the rule of those who can show appropriate descent. There is next to no interest in any religious ideas as such. Even in the account of the forced reception of Islam by Bone, which is highly unusual in the history of the expansion of Islam, the argument is cast in purely practical and political, rather than religious, terms. The second matter for comment is the role the Bone chronicle and other Bugis and Makasar written sources from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, if not earlier, have already played in the dramatic new understanding of South Sulawesi history from about 1000 CE to about 1600 CE that has developed in the past few decades. The continuity of placenames, in particular, has allowed the integration of written sources and the results of extensive archaeological survey and excavation. South Sulawesi in the first half of the second millennium provides by far the best example of the evolution of an Austronesian-speaking society towards higher levels of political development in the almost complete absence of external influences. It throws comparative light on many parallel contexts across the Pacific, as well as in island Southeast Asia. The Bone chronicle with its emphasis on the selection and role of successive rulers is particularly useful in this regard.

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