Manjapahit — more commonly Majapahit — is the name of the great Javanese Hindu-Buddhist empire which, at the height of its power in the fourteenth century, dominated much of the Eastern Archipelago. In The Achehnese Vol. I, Snouck Hurgronje cites Manjapahit not as a political entity but as the locality into which, in a well-known Malay pantun, one of the seven Pleiades stars is said to have fallen in olden times.
The Malay Pantun
The verse, given by the author in the original Malay and in translation, runs:
Bintang tujoh tinggal anam, Jatoh sabiji di Manjapahit. Ais tuboh sarasa dimanit, Lagi tambah deng an penyakit.
“Seven stars, six only now remain. One has fallen into Manjapahit. Athirst is my body as though I had fever, increased still more by (other) sickness.”
The “Seven Stars” — known elsewhere in Malay as the Bintang Ketujoh or Pleiades — are the constellation which popular superstition in the Malay Peninsula and in Java associates with the fertility of the soil and with drought and rain. The falling of one star into Manjapahit is thus a mythological touch linking the disappearance of a Pleiad with the fall of the great Javanese empire itself.
Mythological Survival
The survival of the name Manjapahit in a Malay pantun current in Acheh is itself a small monument to the long-continued prestige of the Javanese empire among the peoples of the archipelago. Even after the empire had disappeared, its name lived on in the popular imagination as a byword for an ancient and vanished power, and the pantun quoted by Snouck Hurgronje illustrates how the Achehnese, who never formed part of the Majapahit dominions, nonetheless inherited from the common Malay stock of folklore a memory of that empire.
Account from Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819 — Manjapahit
Manjapahit — more commonly Majapahit (Javanese Madjapahit) — was the great Hindu-Javanese empire which, at its apogee in the fourteenth century under Hayam Wuruk (Rajasanagara) and his minister Gajah Mada, held sway over much of what is now Indonesia and the Malay world. Although the empire itself was extinguished in the early sixteenth century, its name lived on for centuries in Malay, Achehnese and Javanese literary memory, and especially in the Malay pantun (the four-line quatrain that is the most characteristic verse-form of the archipelago), where Majapahit functions as a stock name of vanished grandeur — paired, in one well-known formula, with the Pleiades (Bintang Tujuh / Ketika) as a symbol of the remote and unattainable.
Place in Van der Kemp’s article
In P. H. van der Kemp’s Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819 the name Manjapahit appears only as a cultural-poetic allusion — a passing Malay reference of the kind that an Achehnese court or a Malay-speaking intermediary might use to give a phrase the weight of antiquity. The empire itself is not the subject of any sustained discussion; the reference is incidental to the broader Malay cultural setting in which the Acheh treaty of 1819 was negotiated. The name surfaces in the same linguistic and literary register that produced, in Van der Kemp’s footnotes and appendices, the Achehnese terms of address, the Arabic titulature of the sultans, and the Malay letters reproduced from the archives of Penang and Calcutta.
Historical and literary background
The historical Majapahit was founded in 1293 by Raden Wijaya after the collapse of the Singhasari kingdom and the failed Mongol expedition against Java. Its capital lay in the Brantas river basin of eastern Java, near modern Trowulan. The Nagarakretagama of 1365 lists among its dependencies places as distant as Sumatra (Jambi, Palembang), the Malay Peninsula, Borneo, and even portions of the eastern islands. Whether or not that list represents effective political control, the empire’s reputation — its name in particular — exercised a powerful influence on later Malay political thought: Malay dynasties for centuries afterwards claimed descent from the “kings of Majapahit” as a legitimating device.
In the pantun tradition the name Majapahit is folded into the _pembayang (the first two, image-bearing lines of the quatrain), where it typically serves as the conventionalised, atmospheric counterpart to a piece of folk cosmology. The pairing with the Pleiades is one such formula: the rising of the Pleiades marked agricultural and maritime seasons throughout the archipelago, and the conjunction of an extinct Javanese empire with a celestial timekeeper gave the verse its proverbial gravity.
Significance for the Acheh narrative
The fleeting presence of the name Majapahit in Van der Kemp’s apparatus is a reminder that the negotiations conducted at Acheh in 1819 did not take place in a cultural vacuum. The sultans whose claims Raffles and Coombs were called upon to adjudicate — Djohor and Syf — inhabited a world in which Malay literary references, Islamic titulature, and memories of pre-Islamic Javanese greatness all coexisted. The Achehnese court was itself the heir to a long tradition of Malay letters, and its diplomats and letter-writers drew on the same stock of names — including Majapahit — that animated pantun and hikayat throughout the region.
See Also
- Java
- Malay Peninsula
- India
- Eastern Archipelago
- Acheh
- Sultan Djohor
- Sultan Syf
- Stamford Raffles
- John Coombs
- Acheh treaty of 1819
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.
Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819, by P. H. van der Kemp, in Bijdragen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië, 6e Volgr., Deel VII (1900), pp. 159–239. Universiteitsbibliotheek Vrije Universiteit, LS.08781.