Bali-Atjé — in Javanese tradition Kodjrat-Bali-Atjé — is the bedekte taal name by which the Javanese chronicle tradition, in De Roo de la Faille’s reading, recorded the dead ancestral land of Taroema on the Sumatran east-coastal Overwal — the country of Tandjoengpoera-Aru-Deli-Asahan that the Atjehnese conquest of Aroe of 1539 would close. It is the wedergade (counterpart) on the Sumatran Overwal of the Bali of the great Sunda islands, and the place-world whose name encodes both the dead elephant-land (Koendjara-ma-ti) and the ancestral Atjé sphere.
The Javanese legend of Djaja Baja
The Javanese legend recorded by Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles (History II, p. 87) speaks of Astina, the realm of praboe Djaja-Baja of Jaya’s oldest princely house, whose name — h-asti-na-ma, “elephant” — was changed on the dynasty’s extinction to Enj°- or Guj’rat. A Dutch babad-translation (Not. Bat. Gen. vol. 42) speaks of this king as a “Moorschen” prince of kodjrat-Bali-Atjé — where the mor, De Roo de la Faille notes, is plainly used in the sense of kahilangan (“vanished, deceased”), and the Kodj or Guj-rat conceals Koen- of Goendjara-ma-t-i, “the dead land of elephants”.
Decoding: Koendjara-ma-ti Bali-Atjé
The full name Kodjrat-Bali-Atjé De Roo de la Faille decodes as Koendjara-ma-ti Bali-Atjé — “the dead elephant-land Bali-Atjé”. The Koendjara (“elephant-land”) is the Astina of the Sumatran east coast, the elephant-rich country whose products the Roteiro of Vasco da Gama records for Xarnauz; the ma-ti (“dead”) marks the dynasty’s extinction; and the Bali-Atjé is the ancestral Atjé sphere whose bedekte taal form the Javanese chronicle tradition preserved. The same Bali-Atjé, De Roo de la Faille argues, is the Bali-Atjé of Pati Oenoes’s 1513 attack-junk, caulked with seven layers of kapoer-gala-gala.
The Sumatran Bali
The Bali of Bali-Atjé, De Roo de la Faille argues, is not the great Sunda island of Bali but the Bali of the Sumatran Overwal — the wedergade of the Javanese Bali, in the same way that Tandjoengpoera on West Java is the wedergade of Tandjoengpoera in Langkat, and Madjapahit at Langsar is the wedergade of the great Majapahit of East Java. The east-coast Sumatran polities, De Roo de la Faille argues, were the gade and wedergade of the Javanese ones — the same names attached to two places, one in the ancestral land of Dja-g-oe-wa and one in its Javanese copy.
Significance
For AcehWiki, Bali-Atjé is the principal bedekte taal form by which De Roo de la Faille ties the Javanese legend of praboe Djaja-Baja to the Aru-Atjeh sphere — the dead ancestral land of Taroema whose name encodes both the dead elephant-land (Koendjara-ma-ti) and the ancestral Atjé sphere. Its identification, by De Roo de la Faille, with the Bali of the Sumatran Overwal also marks it as the principal east-coast landmark of the pre-Atjehnese Hindu-Javanese complex in Javanese chronicle record.
See Also
- Astina
- Taroema
- Djawaka
- Madjapahit in Langsar
- Tandjoengpoera
- Djaja Baja
- Atjeh-Aroe War (1539)
- Bedekte taal
- Historische Curiositeiten uit Malajoe en Java
Source
Historische Curiositeiten uit Malajoe en Java, by P. de Roo de la Faille (Den Haag: Maart 1954), chapter “Djempol Soekoe”, pp. 18-21, and chapter “Over Soenan Kalidjaga”, pp. 47-49.