Science and Technology in Champa Inscriptions

Abstract

The Kingdom of Champa was one of the oldest kingdom in mainland Southeast Asia mentioned by Chinese scholars in 192AD and disappeared completely in 1832AD. Among all of the heritages left by the kingdom were a number of inscriptions, some in Cham, some in Sanskrit and the rest in combination of both languages. Some of these inscriptions were studied by scholars such as Louis Finot, Édouard Huber, Georges Cœdès, Paul Mus, Majumdar and lately by Anne Valery Schweyer. But most of their findings are related only to historical, cultural and linguistical aspects. In this paper, we shall highlight further aspects covering scientific and technological thinking of the Champa people.

1. Introduction

Our idea here in this paper is actually an application of a very fundamental concept in studying any civilization. That is about studying its basic variables which was said to caused its development such as written records, technologies, monuments, geography, politics, religion, language, oral, international relations, economy, cultural, etc. If we take Greek Civilization, or Islamic Civilization, or Western Civilization, or Indian Civilization, or Chinese Civilization for example, this statement is almost correct. In this postmodern and globalised world, it is almost correct statement to say that the scientific and technological variable of the Western Civilization are the strongest variable contributed to its development. Of course there are others variables, such as language, culture, philosophy, economic, etc, but all of these variables are said to be supportive only to the former. That is actually the reason and motivation for us to look at our own sources of science and technology. We want to know generally whether we also have a reasonable sources of knowledge that later can be develop using the most sophisticated tools such as logics, mathematics, computer sciences etc. Do we have such sources? We can only answer this question by doing detail inspection to our written sources, such as inscriptions and manuscripts. We will tackle the problem of manuscripts in later time. Our focus here is only on inscriptions. We know with certainty that overall inscriptions left by Champa Civilization are total 210. Out of it, 127 are in Cham, 42 are in Sanskrit and 27 are in Cham-Sanskrit, refers to Aymonier (1891), Bergaigne (1888), Jacques (1995), Majumdar (1927/1985) and Schweyer (2004). We managed till now to collect and published 40 inscriptions which are in Cham, or part of it in Cham, refers to Mohammad Alinor and Mohd Zain (2008). We intent in the future to publish all of this 210 Campa inscriptions. As we mentioned earlier in the abstract, unfortunately, most of the research done on this inscriptions dominantly are in the fields of Social Sciences such as Linguistic, History, Politic, Religion, Sociology, Culture, etc. Hardly we can find any writing which particularly discussed about Sciences and Technologies. This phenomenon may be due to the expertise of the researcher. It was reasonably understood that a historian will look only on historical aspects, a linguist will only look at linguistical aspects, a sociologist will look at a sociological aspects, etc. Our expertise as a mathematician and historian will also reflect on what are we going to do in this paper. We will gather historical materials about science and technology of Champa Civilization. This does not mean that we will gather all of those materials, because we don’t have enough time to do so. We will only select three materials, i.e. classification of knowledge (philosophical), number (mathematical) and buildings (technological). We start by the philosophical materials.

2. Classification of Knowledge

Even that this theme is much broader than what should we say about it, i.e. Classification of Scientific and Technological Knowledge, but we still insist on discussing it because of the reason that in reality, there are difficulties in trying to classify any classical knowledge. Especially, if someone try to classify classical knowledge using modern ways of developing knowledge. We can not define (modern) mathematics to the mathematics done in classical era of China and India, even Greek and Islam. We can not define works in physics written by Aristotle as similar as (modern) physics. So, we leave what Champa’s scholars said about what they are experts on, written in their inscriptions, collected first by Maspero (1910-13/1914/1928/2002), second by Majumdar (1927/1985), and combined by Mohammad Alinor (2004, 2005 & 2006). We give in the following a list of expertise of Champa’s scholars :

CKC1 : Astadhyayi of Panini and its commentary Kashikavrtti of Vamana-Jayaditya.

CKC2 : Horasastra, i.e. Astrology and Astronomy.

CKC3 : Six systems of Indian philosophy, i.e. Samkhya, Yoga, Mimamsa, Vedanta, Nyaya dan Vaisesika.

CKC4 : Buddhist doctrines.

CKC5 : Dharmasastra, particularly Manavadharmasastra, Manu Smrti, Bharggavija Dharmasastra and Narada Smrti.

CKC6 : Writtings of Vaisnaya and Saiva, particularly Uttarakalpa and Caktanandatarangini.

CKC7 : Four Veda.

CKC8 : Epic, particularly Ramayana and Mahabharata.

CKC9 : Purana, particularly Artha-puranasastra and Puranartha.

CKC10 : Sanskrit literature.

Astadyayi of Panini is the oldest book in the world that deals with grammar analysis, which should be compare now with Chomsky. Horasastra is the terminology used in Sanskrit to represent knowledge in astrology and astronomy (Greek) or nujm and falak (Arab). Astronomy and falak are more on mathematical aspects of studying the sky, compared to astrology and nujm which are more on traditional medicine and predictions. Among the six Indian philosophical systems mentioned above, Nyaya is a branch of philosophy that concerntrated on epistemology and logic, which could be compare to Frege-Russell idea of Logicism. And, Samkhya is a philosophy that deal with numbers, which should be compare to Pythagoras (Greek) or Ikhwan al-Safa (Arab-Islam). And lastly, we should also mentioned that some of the writing in Purana are on cosmology, which is now related to astronomy.

3. Number

Compared to the previous section above, which we analysed all of the published inscriptions, following work done by Maspero and Majumdar, here in this section, we are only interested on inscriptions written in Cham language. This going back to our works on 40 inscriptions in Cham language mentioned in Introduction. There is nothing wrong of doing also analysis on inscriptions in Sanskrit, but we will then have some specific type of knowledge that are not original in nature, i.e. not in a local language. In specific knowledge such as numbers, if we do the same as in Section 2, we will have two ideas of Champa numbers, i.e. foreign (its terminologies are in Sanskrit, Pali or Tamil) and local (its terminologies are in Cham, or Malay, or any Austronesian languages). We are only concern on studying the local terminologies. This information will further help our vision of collecting materials on Austronesian’s Science and Technology, which are the vision of Akademi Sains Islam Malaysia (ASASI). So, based on this reason, we give the following list of information :

i. Dong Yen Chau, 3^rd Saka Century/4^th AD Century : tujuh (7) and saribu (1000).

ii. Nhan-Bieu, 833S/911AD : dalapan (8), sapluh (10), tluv pluh (30), tluv pluh tijuh (37), nam pluh (60), tijuh pluh tluv (73), sa rtuh ban pluh dva (162) and tluv rtuh sa pluh (310).

iii. Mi-son, 1036S/1114AD : sa (1), kluv (3), tijuh (7), dalapan (8), salapan (9), sanraun (12), dva pluh dva (22), kluv pluh (30), pak pluh (40), pak pluh nam (46), pak pluh salapan (49), nam pluh dva (62), dalapan pluh dalapan (88), salapan pluh dalapan (98), sarutuh (100), sarutuh salapan pluh (190), kluv rutuh dva pluh (320), salapan rutuh dalapan (980) and sa rivuv sa rutuh salapan (1109).

iv. Mi-son, 1079S/1157AD : lima pluh (50), sa rutuh (100), sa rutuh lima pluh (150), kluv rutuh (300), kluv rutuh tijuh pluh (370) and lima rutuh lima pluh (550).

Nothing much that we can say about this list of information. The only encouraging data that we thought is the word “saribu”=1000. Our interpretation is, the Champa’s has their own number of “0”, which is earlier than the Hindu (6^th Century AD), the Arab (9^th Century AD) and the European (12^th Century AD). But that is only correct if “saribu” is written in a metric system. “Saribu” is actually written in a metric system if we look further on the next data, that is, there are words “sapluh”=10 and “sa rtuh ban pluh dva”=162. This mean that there exist a metric system of writing numbers before 4^th Century AD in Champa Civilization. This is far earlier than the French who established it on 17^th Century AD. The other important data is, except “sa” and “dvi”, which equivalent to “sa” and “dvi” in Sanskrit, all of the others word-numbers are Champa’s. With some minor variations, all of this word-numbers are also apply by Austronesian such as Malay.

4. Buildings

Broadly speaking, what we should do here is to collect all of the technological data in Champa’s inscriptions. By “technology”, we means all of the things know-how ever build by the Champa such as temple, ship, house, agriculture tools, weapons, house tools, palace, writing tools, etc. We doesn’t means the more fundamental and philosophical meaning of “technology” which evolved from the Greek word “technik”, which roughly means “anythings of human product” such as logic, language, sciences and technologies. We will also discuss this type of meaning in the future from the context of Austronesian. We can not managed to do the first broad study here in this section, not even the second one, because of lack of time in research. What we will present here is the collection of buildings ever build by the Champa. They are group together to Myson, Dong Duong, Po Nagar and Minor. Majumdar (1927/1985) managed to studied all of the art of this building which he classified as primitive (7^th-10^th Century AD), cubic (7^th-9^th Century AD), mixed (10^th Century AD), classic (11^th Century AD), pyramidal (10^th-14^th Century Ad) and derived (12^th-17^th Century AD). We will continue this studies later on.

Acknowledgement

Lastly, we would like to thak Asia Research Center, Royal Academy of Cambodia and Kore Foundation for Advanced Studies for giving us opportunity presenting this paper at the 4^th International Conference on Southeast Asian Cultural Values : Angkor, A Symbol of Cultural Prestige in Southeast Asia, 15-16 December 2008.

Reference

Aymonier, M. E. 1891. Premiere Etude sur les Inscriptions Tchames. Journal Asiatique, Janvier-Fevrier 1891 : 5-86.

Bergaigne, M. A. 1888. L’Ancien Royaume de Campa, dans L’Indo-Chine, D’apres les Inscriptions. Journal Asiatique, Janvier 1888 : 5-105.

Jacques, C. (ed.) 1995. Etudes Epigraphiques Sur Le Pays Cham, de louis Finot, Edouard Huber, George Coedes et Paul Mus. Paris : EFEO

Majumdar, R.C. 1927/1985. Campa : History & Culture of an Indian Colonial Kingdom in the Far East, 2^nd -16^th Century A.D. Delhi : Gian Publishing House.

Maspero, G. 1910-1913. Le Royaume de Champa. To’ung Pao or Archieves concernant l’histoire les langues, la geographie et l’ethnographie de l’Asie orientale. Volume XI Mac 1910 : 125-36, Volume XI May 1910 : 155-220, Volume XI July 1910 : 319-50, Volume XI October 1910 : 489-526, Volume XI December 1910 : 547-66, Volume XII Mac 1911 : 53-87, Volume XII May 1911 : 235-58, Volume XII July 1911 : 291-315, Volume XII October 1911 : 451-82, Volume XII December 1911 : 589-696 and Volume XIV May 1913 : 153-202. All are group together in Le Royaume de Champa. 1914. Leiden : E.J. Brill. 2^nd Edition by van Oest, G. 1928. Paris and Brussells. Translated in Einglish by Tips, W.E.J. 2002. The Champa Kingdom : The History of an Extinct Vietnamese Culture. Bangkok : White Lotus Press.

Mohammad Alinor bin Abdul Kadir. 2004. Dialog Peradaban Melayu Dianalisis Menerusi Sebaran Kesusasteraan. Kesturi 2004 : 35-44.

——————————————-. 2005. Epistemologi dan Mantik dalam Tamadun Melayu Terawal. Kesturi 2005 : 38-54.

——————————————-. 2006. Pengelasan Ilmu Melayu-Sanskrit. Kesturi 2006 : 15-24.

Mohammad Alinor bin Abdul Kadir and Mohd Zain bin Musa. 2008. Prasasti Berbahasa Melayu-Campa. In Nik Hassan Shuhaimi bin Nik Abdul Rahman. Kebudayaan, Kesenian dan Peradaban Alam Melayu. Bangi : Penerbit ATMA, UKM. Also in www.asasi.my.

Schweyer, A.V. 2004. Situation of the Cam Rubings in the French Collections. Seminar Antarabangsa Manuskrip Melayu Campa. KKKW, JMA and EFEO.

Note: This paper written by Mohamad Zain Bin Musa and Mohammad Alinor Bin Abdul Kadir, from Institut Alam dan Tamadun Melayu (ATMA), Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) , 43600 Bangi, Selangor, Malaysia.