Jan Just Witkam
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JAN JUST WITKAM INVENTORY OF THE ORIENTAL MANUSCRIPTS OF THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF LEIDEN VOLUME 18 MANUSCRIPTS OR. 17.001 – OR. 18.000 REGISTERED IN LEIDEN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY IN THE PERIOD BETWEEN APRIL 1980 AND DECEMBER 1982 TER LUGT PRESS LEIDEN 2016 Illustration front cover: MS Leiden Or. 17.903, ff. 3b-4a, a collection of religious texts, mostly in Malay, originating from Aceh, Indonesia, 19th century. INVENTORIES OF COLLECTIONS OF ORIENTAL MANUSCRIPTS INVENTORY OF THE ORIENTAL MANUSCRIPTS OF THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF LEIDEN VOLUME 18 MANUSCRIPTS OR. 17.001 – OR. 18.000 REGISTERED IN LEIDEN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY IN THE PERIOD BETWEEN APRIL 1980 AND DECEMBER 1982 COMPILED BY JAN JUST WITKAM PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF PALEOGRAPHY AND CODICOLOGY OF THE ISLAMIC WORLD IN LEIDEN UNIVERSITY INTERPRES LEGATI WARNERIANI EMERITUS TER LUGT PRESS LEIDEN 2016 © Copyright by Jan Just Witkam & Ter Lugt Press, Leiden, The Netherlands, 2016. The form and contents of the present inventory are protected by Dutch and international copyright law and database legislation. All use other than within the framework of the law is forbidden and liable to prosecution. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the author and the publisher. First electronic publication: 2016 PREFACE The arrangement of the present volume of the Inventories of Oriental manuscripts in Leiden University Library does not significantly differ from the volumes, which have been published earlier. For the sake of brevity, I refer to my prefaces in those volumes. A few essentials may be repeated here, as I may be permitted to add a few new remarks. First I must once more state the obvious, namely that my inventories are just that: inventories. They are not catalogues. Some of my descriptions are quite elaborate and would deserve to be used as the preparatory work for a dedicated catalogue. The basic elements for each entry of the present inventory are: 1. class-mark, 2. language(s), 3. details of physical description, 4. survey of the contents, 5. provenance, 6. present location on the shelf. Depending on the nature of the material, exceptions and divergences are made from this strict arrangement. The collective provenance of a series of manuscripts is summarized in the form of a short text preceding the individual descriptions. The individual provenance is repeated for each physical entity. Quite a number of manuscripts mentioned in the present volume were viewed by autopsy, but more were not. The sheer number of manuscripts makes it impossible to look at them all. Nor can it be expected that I know all languages in which the texts are written that are described here. The lists that I publish are based on the handwritten ledgers that are kept by the curators of Oriental manuscripts in the Leiden library. Later complete autopsy may be achieved, but trying to achieve this at the present stage of the inventorizing of the Leiden collection would seriously hamper the progress of the project, that is already taking much longer than I had anticipated. When a manuscript was not inspected this can be seen from a simple typographical device. Whenever the indication of the shelf-mark is put between round brackets, I have not, or not extensively or sufficiently, inspected the manuscript, and its entry in the inventory is based mostly or entirely on secondary sources, be they published or not. These have, of course, always been indicated. When the shelf-mark is put between square brackets and preceded by an asterisk, this means that I have had the manuscript in my hands, at least once but probably more than once, and also that the description contains elements that can only be seen in the original manuscript, not from the existing library inventories. Such autopsy does not mean that I am, automatically, the author of all information given under that particular class-mark. When I am not, the description is always properly referenced. The present volume contains a description of the entire collection of Balinese popular stories and related texts from Bali that Dr. Hedi Hinzler donated to the Leiden library in September 1981 (registered as Or. 17.172 – Or. 17.895). Bibliographically speaking they form the great majority of the collection presently described. However, for the moment I have kept their description very succinct, exactly as I had done in the handwritten ledger that I kept at the time and of which the present volume is an elaborated version. It is the first time that the existence of this mass of popular stories is revealed and I can only hope that scholars will find their way to these texts, that are preserved nowhere else. More elaborate descriptions may be published at a later stage. There are more minor collections described in the present volume that deserve mention. One of these is the literary legacy of Ms. Tamara van Houten, née de Coutouly, a first-timer in bibliography (Or. 17.969). Another bibliographical first-timer in the present volume is the Ternate archive (Or. 17.066). This and other inventory volumes that date from the period that I was in charge of the Oriental collections in the Leiden library (1974-2005) read like an unofficial bibliographical report of my acquisitions. While noting the basics of the entries by copying these from my handwritten lists, many memories came back to me, both about the circumstances under which I had purchased the manuscripts and about the people I acquired them from. This was not unpleasant a sensation but I have learned to trust my memory not too much. It is an unreliable friend, and in general I am convinced that one of the functions of human memory is to selectively forget, rather than to remember. So while compiling this volume I have resisted the temptation to play around with my memories of the good old days (‘when everything was better’) and to restrict myself to the bare bibliographical facts. In that way I avoid to project all sorts of wisdom of hindsight to the circumstances that are implied by the provenance histories in these and other volumes of the Leiden inventory. I am aware that interesting, and maybe even important facts will be lost by that decision, but that is better than to present fiction. I might, some day, come up with in a different sort of publication of more personal nature, that is not necessarily related to books or manuscripts alone. The pages in this volume are not numbered. These page numbers are omitted on purpose. As there will be regular updates to this volume (and to the other volumes of the Inventory for that matter), a pagination of the present edition would immediately be invalid for all coming updates. The user of this inventory should instead refer to class-marks of the manuscript (the so-called Or.-numbers) and to nothing else. This numerus currens is the only stable and unchangeable element in my descriptions of the Leiden Oriental manuscripts. The reader may have noted that I have restricted the functionality of the pdf format of the volume. It means that the pages in this volume cannot be printed, nor can they be copied and pasted. I do not want printed copies to be available. I understand that this has disadvantages. However, the great advantage is that, as the online version can easily be changed for corrections or additions, the reader of the online version has always the most recent and updated version at hand. I know that it is not difficult to crack the security of my pdf files. I have seen it happen. Those who indulge in such procedure should be aware that they, by doing so, necessarily miss the updates and corrections, and that they are merely doing a disservice to themselves. For this volume, more than for any of the previously compiled volumes, I have been permanently and greatly helped by the staff of the Special Collections reading room in the Leiden Library. Their generous professional attitude towards the readers of the special collections is exemplary. Many librarians in other countries could learn a lesson from them. They understand that readers do not come to steal information about heritage, but that with the results of their research they add value to the collections. I hope that they view my work as such an added value. For me, it was a pleasure to work with them. I end with an important note. Although the set of inventories, of which I am publishing here volume 18, contain descriptions of public and private collections, which will hopefully profit of the existence of electronic versions of my work, none of my inventories has ever been made at the express insistence or by the specific demand of these institutions, on the contrary, I may say. The idea to compile such inventories, the design of their structure, the acquisition of the necessary information from a multitude of primary and secondary sources, the way of publishing, all this is my own idea and it is my work alone. This work is therefore my sole property and I assert the moral right of the authorship of form and content of these inventories, with ample reference, of course, to what I have said elsewhere about the method of compilation. Prof. Jan Just Witkam, Leiden, 26 January 2016 Interpres Legati Warneriani Emeritus INVENTORY OF THE ORIENTAL MANUSCRIPTS OF THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF LEIDEN VOLUME 18 MANUSCRIPTS OR. 17.001 – OR.