Young leaves, old poems

Claim (verbatim)

Balinese scribal culture kept Old Javanese poetry alive the only way the humid tropics allow: by recopying lontar palm-leaf before each physical carrier rotted, a treadmill with a step time of a century or two. The consequence is a signature found in few other literatures — a corpus whose texts are old and whose objects are young, everywhere, without exception. The kakawin that Balinese reading societies still recite include at least a dozen compositions securely datable before 1400 on internal and epigraphic evidence — the Ramayana of the ninth century, the Arjunawiwaha of Airlangga's era, the Bharatayuddha dated 1157, the Sumanasantaka, Smaradahana, Bhomāntaka, Sutasoma, the Desawarnana of 1365 — yet the leaves that carry them were almost all incised in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the famous sole old witness of the Desawarnana is itself a copy of 1740. If the treadmill model is right, the gap is structural, not accidental: no amount of searching in Balinese collections will turn up a leaf that beats the recopying half-life, because the mechanism that preserved the words is precisely the mechanism that destroyed every early object. Prediction: tabulating colophon dates across the major catalogued Balinese lontar collections — the Kirtya's registers (Singaraja, founded 1928), the Leiden holdings in Hinzler's and Pigeaud's catalogues, and the Lombok-collection codices — no dated lontar written in Bali or Lombok will predate 1600, fewer than one in twenty will predate 1800, and no kakawin composed before 1400 will survive, there or anywhere, in any witness copied within three hundred years of its composition (primary clause: the zero-before-1600 floor joined to the three-hundred-year minimum gap for pre-1400 kakawin; the verdict follows it). Kill (not yet built): a union colophon-date table assembled from H.I.R. Hinzler's Catalogue of Balinese Manuscripts in the Library of the University of Leiden (1986-87), Pigeaud's Literature of Java I-IV (1967-1980), the Gedong Kirtya registers, and the composition datings in Zoetmulder's Kalangwan (1974).

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: tabulating colophon dates across the major catalogued Balinese lontar collections — the Kirtya's registers (Singaraja, founded 1928), the Leiden holdings in Hinzler's and Pigeaud's catalogues, and the Lombok-collection codices — no dated lontar written in Bali or Lombok will predate 1600, fewer than one in twenty will predate 1800, and no kakawin composed before 1400 will survive, there or anywhere, in any witness copied within three hundred years of its composition (primary clause: the zero-before-1600 floor joined to the three-hundred-year minimum gap for pre-1400 kakawin; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill (not yet built): a union colophon-date table assembled from H.I.R. Hinzler's Catalogue of Balinese Manuscripts in the Library of the University of Leiden (1986-87), Pigeaud's Literature of Java I-IV (1967-1980), the Gedong Kirtya registers, and the composition datings in Zoetmulder's Kalangwan (1974).

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

The signature the claim names - Old Javanese texts old, their lontar carriers young - is the textbook fact of the field, stated by Zoetmulder and visible in every catalogue: the Desawarnana's oldest witness is the 1740 Lombok copy, and the pre-1400 kakawin all survive in eighteenth-to-twentieth-century leaves, so the three-hundred-year-gap half of the primary clause is effectively guaranteed by known witness dates. But the zero-before-1600 floor and the fewer-than-one-in-twenty-before-1800 share are a demographic distribution that the union colophon-date table - explicitly 'not yet built' - would have to establish, and no source states that precise floor. The qualitative law and the materials are in print; the numeric census is un-run. Adjacent.

• P.J. Zoetmulder, Kalangwan: A Survey of Old Javanese Literature (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974)
• H.I.R. Hinzler, Catalogue of Balinese Manuscripts in the Library of the University of Leiden and Other Collections in the Netherlands (Leiden: Brill/Leiden University Press, 1986-1987)
• Th.G.Th. Pigeaud, Literature of Java, 4 vols (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1967-1980)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.