The Keunong Tanggilè was the specially long interval in the Achehnese keunong series, by which the computation of seasons was kept in approximate agreement with the solar year. The Achehnese reckoned their agricultural year not by the months of the Mohammedan lunar calendar alone, but by the conjunctions of the moon with the constellation of the Scorpion (bintang kala), which they called keunong (Malay kena)—that is to say “hit” or “come into contact”. These conjunctions occurred at intervals of about 27⅓ days, so that an average solar year contained 13.363 keunongs, while a lunar year contained exactly 13. To reconcile the two cycles, the Achehnese treated one interval each year as a double-length “long keunong”, and this they called the keunong tanggilè.
The interval in question fell between keunong 1 and keunong 23—that is, between the conjunction that fell on the 1st of a Mohammedan month and the one that opened the next solar cycle. Since this period contained an extra invisible conjunction (the moon and Scorpion coinciding just before the new moon, when the moon was not observable), the Achehnese omitted the 13th keunong from their reckoning and went on the theory that there was but one keunong in each month, with one interval each year twice as long as the others. This was the keunong tanggilè. The Achehnese no longer knew the origin of the name; some connected it with tenggilè, the armadillo, asserting that this animal could only be caught during the period in question.
The keunong series, with the tanggilè inserted, was the framework on which the Achehnese hung their whole calendar of agricultural tasks, maritime voyages and seasonal feasts. The twelve ordinary keunongs were named after their (odd-numbered) lunar dates: 23, 21, 19, 17, 15, 13, 11, 9, 7, 5, 3, 1; and a correction was made from time to time, by purely empirical observation, whenever the keunongs of the series began to drift too far from those actually observable in the sky. Thus keunong 23 almost corresponded to January, keunong 21 to February, and so on, each name suggesting the recurrence of certain natural phenomena—winds, fish-migrations, crab-wanderings, the brightness of Orion’s belt—and of certain tasks of agriculture or navigation.
The institution of the tanggilè bears witness to the practical ingenuity with which the Achehnese reconciled two incommensurable cycles. Their teachers had no proper basis of calculation—indeed, as Snouck Hurgronje notes, they did not even understand the real meaning of the keunong computation, the most expert of his informants supposing the corrective year to be one of 360 days, not the solar year of 365. Yet the system worked, because the empirical rectification—counting two consecutive months as keunong 9 or keunong 7 when the heavens persistently belied the series—kept the reckoning within a tolerable margin of error. Through the keunong tanggilè the Achehnese were able to fix the seasons for sowing padi, for the kanduri blang, for the kanduri la’ot of the seine-fishers and for the embarkation of voyages to the West Coast of Acheh.
See Also
Source
The Achehnese, Vol. I, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906.