Ed.: Nurhayati Rahman, Anil Hukma, Idwar Anwar. Diterbitkanoleh Pusat Studi La Galigo Divisi Ilmu Sosial dan Humaniora Pusat Kegiatan Penelitian Universitas Hasanuddin dengan Pemerintah Kabupaten Barru. Makassar, 2003. XXVII + 558 hal.*

The reviewed collection includes a short Introduction (p. X-XIX), written by the Deputy Minister of Culture of Indonesia Anhar Gonggong, an introductory article (p. XX-XXVII), authored by a member of the editorial board of the collection, an Indonesian researcher of the Bugian epic cycle "La Galigo" (hereinafter - LG) Nurhayati Rahman, and 35 articles. The vast majority of them are based on reports delivered at a PH conference held in South Sulawesi in 2002. The collection also includes several articles taken from the Sawerigading collection published in Jakarta in 1990, one article from the Dutch magazine Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land - en Volkenkunde (1999), and one article from the Indonesian newspaper Kompas (2000). Almost all of the articles are written in Indonesian, and a few are written in English.

The author of the introductory article of the reviewed collection writes that under the name "La Galigo" the Bugi people (the largest ethnic group of South Sulawesi and the entire eastern half of Indonesia) usually mean a collection of manuscripts of a mythological epic (epik mitologis) stored in many libraries of the world (or owned by private individuals), under the word galigo - a separate song of this epic, performed at some traditional ceremony (the prefix formation maggaligo means "to sing a song from La Galigo", and paggaligo is a performer of such a song, similar to the ancient Greek aed).

Due to the fact that Nurhayati Rahman defines LH as a "mythological epic", it is necessary to give some explanation.

In the 19th century, the Dutch missionary linguist B. F. Mattes suggested that the surviving texts of LH are fragments from a once-existing epic. The Bugian princess Aruppanchana compiled a chronologically ordered list of episodes (the"plot") of LG and wrote down the initial part (about a third) of the LG text, which was partially published by Matthes in his "Bugian Anthology" (Matthes, 1872).

Mattes ' idea of a complete epic that existed among the Bugians was not supported by other European researchers. Thus, R. A. Kern [Kern, 1939, p.3] defines LH as an "epic cycle", i.e. a set of poems that tell about several generations of people connected by ties of kinship. The poems often talk about what happened to these people or their parents before, and often about what they will have in the future. Developing the idea of R. A. Kern, S. Koolhof [Koolhof, 1992, p.17-18] retells the plot of the cycle, and the sequence of episodes is basically the same as that of Mattes.

As for the Introductory article, Nurhayati Rahman does not introduce the concept of "epic cycle", but speaks about "looking back" and "on predictions of the future", which are found in the poems of LH. She emphasizes that this is one of the largest works of poetry in world literature, far exceeding the volume of the Indian epic "Mahabharata". Nurhayati Rahman is right that the spread of PH occurred through the interaction of two traditions - oral and written: the first of them was more ancient, but then it actually merged with the written tradition. It can be added that the name of the cycle "Sureggaligo", which is used in the texts of LH (but not mentioned by the author of the Introductory Article), is connected with the written tradition. The first component of this Bugi compound word 'sure' is genetically identical, for example, to the Malay surat - "letter", Tagalog sugat - "wound" and comes from the Proto-Austronesian root

* La Galigo: in the footsteps of the World's literary heritage, ed. by Nurhayati Rahman, Anil Hukma, Idwar Anwar. Publ. La Galigo Research Center in the Department of Social Sciences and Humanities of the University's Center for Research. Hasanuddin and the rule of Kabupaten Barru. Makassar, 2003. XXVII + 558 p.

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* suRat - "to wound" (like many other peoples, the ancient Austronesians regarded writing as scratching or wounding). In the later Bugian language, this word denoted written poetic works written in a special meter, which is used in LH and in some works of religious content.

Nurhayati Rahman's observation that the old Bughi script used in the LG manuscripts comes from the Indian Pallava script is quite reasonable. It does not give the date of origin of the old Bughian script, because it is really difficult to establish it. Judging by R. Caldwell's observations, the Bugian script began to be used to record genealogies of aristocrats from the 14th century [Caldwell, 1988]. It is natural to assume that in the first centuries after the medieval Bugians became familiar with the art of writing, it was used mainly for exchanging short messages (for example, the small Hanunoo people in the Philippines did this in the first half of the It seems that a little later they began to use for writing ribbons made of stitched palm leaves or pieces of tree bark (there are still "apparatuses" for reading such texts), which could fit a little more text, but still it could not be long. Long written poems, including those related to the LG cycle, appeared among the Bugians only after their acquaintance with European paper, not earlier than the XVI century. But even then, it is unlikely that all the poems of the cycle were recorded at once. No ancient texts on palm leaves or tree bark have been preserved, and the few records made on these materials seem to be no older than the beginning of the 19th century.

Nurhayati Rahman very briefly recounts the first episode of the series, in which, as in almost all published stories of the series so far, the most important moment is the decision of the Supreme Sky God Patoto'e ("The Arbiter of destinies") to send his son Batar-Guru to the Earth, then still empty. Soon, several villages with commoners are lowered from the Sky, and Batara Guru becomes king. He marries the daughter of the god of the Underworld, who floats out of the sea, and they have a son, Batara-Lattu' - the heir to the throne of Batara-Guru. In general, the Earth is ruled by five generations of descendants of the gods. Both the list of episodes of LH in the book of Mattes and the retelling of the cycle in the book of Koolhof end with the fact that most of the descendants of the gods going back to Batara-Guru, who reigned on Earth in the Bugian state of Luwu (which is considered the oldest)1 or in other states, leave the Earth, going to Heaven. Thus, both the beginning and the end of the cycle's plot, which was recognized until recently, are quite clearly marked.

In recent years, however, other points of view have been expressed on the volume of PH. For example, the leading French researcher of the Bugian ethnography, K. Pelras, received a text from an Indonesian friend that tells about the events that should have preceded the first episode of the cycle in the understanding of Mattes and Koolhof. Pelras reported on this text at the 11th Colloquium on Indonesian and Malay Studies, held in Moscow in 1999. He also discusses the "unknown beginning of the PH cycle" in his report at the 2002 PH conference. His article, based on the last report, is included in the peer-reviewed collection (pp. 237-250). The author admits that much less is known about the supposed "beginning of the cycle" among the Bugi people than the episode that was considered the initial one before he made the assumption.

S. Koolhof's article in the peer-reviewed collection (pp. 3-33) was previously published in the Dutch journal "Bijdragen tot de Taal -, Land-en Volkenkunde" (1999). In it, the author notes that the LH cycle is a kind of encyclopedia of Bughian traditional culture, which developed over several centuries; this encyclopedia is not limited to the time before the acquaintance of Bughians with Europeans and with Islamic culture. According to Koolhof, there are a number of manuscripts in the Bugian regions that tell of Saverigading's life after he became ruler of the Underworld. They say that he is finishing copying the Koran and is going to go to the west. It should be understood that he has become or is going to become a Muslim.

1 As was convincingly shown by D. Bulbeck and I. Caldwell [Bulbeck and Caldwell, 2000] (for a review by J. H. Sirk on this book, see: Vostok (Oriens), 2005, N 6, pp. 194-195), Luwu was not the oldest among the territories inhabited by the Bugians. It is possible that Luwu (some of whose rulers bore names of Sanskrit origin) had more developed features of the state than in other Bugian countries, where developed chiefdoms still prevailed in the XV-XII centuries. However, the great development of the state in Louvoux remains an assumption. Most likely, the antiquity of Luvu is nothing more than a poetic and mythological image.

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It seems to me that it would be logical to limit the volume of the epic cycle of LH to those episodes that are included in the List of Mattes and Koolhof's retelling. According to Pelras ,the "unknown beginning of LH" is written in the same meter and in the same language as the known text of the cycle. But this does not mean that the loop should be extended to include an "unknown origin". The Bugians also had poems of religious content, which were written in the sure meter and archaic language. As for the completion of the cycle with a story about Islam, Koolhof speaks only about the manuscripts, without saying whether they are poetic. But I think that even if they turn out to be such, they should not be included in LH. This epic cycle must also be united ideologically, otherwise it is hardly possible to speak of the cycle of poems as a single work of literature.

Two articles in this collection were written by an Indonesian scientist, a teacher at the Makassar Veterans ' University, Mohammed Salim (now retired). Bugi by origin, he transcribed the Latin alphabet and translated into Indonesian the initial part (about 3000 pages) of the LG cycle, written in the 19th century in Bugi script by Princess Aruppanchana. In the first of his articles (pp. 35-42), M. Salim talks about the difficulties associated with this huge work, and gives some information about the archaic poetic Bughian language, which is poorly understood by modern Bughians. In the second article (pp. 43-58), he gives an Indonesian translation of an excerpt from the cycle. It tells about the early years of life And La Galigo, whom tradition considers the author of most of the poems included in the cycle. This hero (son of Saverigading) considers his name to be derived from the Bugi word gali-gali - "caprice": the caprices were allegedly peculiar to his mother, the daughter of the ruler of the Bugi principality of Chin. The princess's whims are also mentioned in other poems of the LG cycle. For example, for a long time, she only allowed her husband near her at night and demanded that her husband leave her at the first sign of dawn. The connection of the name [I La] Galigo 2 with the word gali-gali is not obvious from the point of view of the Bugi language structure, but due to the lack of more probable etymologies3, this attempt at etymologization has a right to exist.

Apart from the works of M. Salim, the collection contains few articles dealing with linguistic issues. Only the article by Makassarts Nurdin Yatim (pp. 331 - 348) is fully devoted to languages.He discusses whether the text of the LG cycle is understandable to the Makassar people, whose native language, like Bugian, belongs to the South Sulawesi group. The author has written out from several pages of the published LH text [Koolhof and Tol, 1995] about 300 words that have similar-sounding or genetically identical (having the same origin) correspondences in Makassar, and more than 40 words that do not have such correspondences. From this, he concludes that 77% of the words found in LH are understandable to Makassar residents.

The lists of correspondences given by Nurdin Yatim raise many doubts. I will mention only a few. In principle, the intelligibility of a word to a speaker of another language depends not on the history of the word, but on its phonetic and semantic proximity to the word of the given language. As for the Bughian and Makassar languages, even genetically identical words that have almost the same meaning often differ greatly in sound, for example: in Bughian "day"-esso, in Makassar - alio, in Bughian "water"-iae, in Makassar (mainly in Russian). eastern dialects of this language) - ere. The given words are monomorphic. Additional difficulties arise in connection with derivation. For example, in Bugian "why" (more precisely: "why is it so that...") - mmagi (pomorfemno mm-a-g-i), in Makassar-ngapai (from the Austronesian root * ara - "what" ; the ancestors of the Bugians replaced the syllable ra, which they thought was a syntactic indicator, to the question indicator ga, before the vowel g; the ancestors of the Makassar people did not perform such an operation). Sometimes words that are genetically identical have very different meanings in Bugian and Makassar, for example: Bugian archaic wordwero - "a flash of light for a moment" and the Makassar verb root-vego - "to touch for a moment". In all these cases, Nurdin Yatim considers the Bugian word understandable to Makassar. I think the percentage of words is

2 Here I is the general article of personal names; La is the article before masculine names. In works of poetry, the use of these articles is usually dictated by size.

3 In the dialects of another South Sulawesi language, Saddan, there is a verb root galigo - "it is difficult to say a lot", but it is clearly borrowed from Bugian.

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in the Bugian language, the LH cycles that are understandable to a Makassar are not 77, but much, perhaps twice, less.

The final conclusion in this author's reasoning is still reasonable: despite the large number of common words, a person who speaks Makassar and does not know the Bugian language of LG understands a little in the text from this epic cycle. This is also evidenced by the interlinear translations of the LG manuscripts into the Makassar language, which are noted by R. A. Kern.

The article by Horst Liebner, a German researcher of early navigation in Indonesia (pp. 374-410), is of great importance for understanding the various parts of the cycle that deal with the characters ' travels. It analyzes the sea voyage of Prince Batara-Lattu' to the country of Tompottikka' (a mythical country whose name means "Sunrise" and which should have been located east of the Bugi region; according to most researchers - on the east coast of Sulawesi or on the Banggai Islands). Liebner shows that the description of this journey presented in the published text of the LG cycle is unrealistic: in order to get from Luwu (on the southern coast of Sulawesi) to Tompottikka', the prince apparently went first of all far to the north, to the Sudu Islands (if the Lagalig name Matasolo refers to this area, located on the approach to the Philippines), from there he went south to East Java, then east to Sumbawa, then to the Moluccas, and finally to Tompotticca.' The return trip is even more difficult: from Tompottikka ' he sails to the Middle Moluccas, from there north to Ternate Island, then across Indonesia to West Java (here, too, the meaning of the Lagalig toponym is questionable), then east to Sumbawa Island, then again west to East Java, and finally back to the Louvre.

Liebner considers such changes of direction unlikely and tries to give them "logic". It separates places with questionable names. So, from the list of countries visited by Batara Lattu', the islands of Sulu and West Java drop out (but East Java remains, Sumbawa Island, Middle Moluccas and Ternate Island also remain). In addition, Liebner takes Tompottikka ' far from Sulawesi - in the region of New Guinea. However, even with these assumptions, routes remain unrealistic from a navigational point of view. It is clear that for the creators of the epic cycle, the order of visiting countries did not matter. What was important was that all the countries mentioned were located, although at different distances, around the Bugian country of Luwu (of which Batara-Lattu ' was the heir) and that they all wanted to maintain good relations with Luwu. Taking all this into account, Liebner writes that the Batara-Lattu journey is not a journey in the "physical" world, but in the "political" one (p. 394).

A number of articles in this collection are devoted to the son of Batar-Lattu ' - Saverigading. According to the text of the epic cycle, he had the misfortune to fall in love with his sister. Marriage to her was impossible, and Saverigading, although the rightful heir to the throne, decided to leave Luva forever and sailed to the country of China, where he found a princess who looked very much like his sister. But even this princess was not easy to marry - her parents and she herself set difficult conditions. Saverigading dealt with them. Both on the way to the Rank and in the Rank, he performed many military feats. However, he did not manage to become the ruler of any state on Earth. As a result, his ship descended into the ocean, and he became the ruler of the Dungeon.

It is not entirely clear where the mythical country of Chin was located. Most likely, the Lagalig Rank was at least partly covered by a slightly later Rank, which was located in the eastern part of South Sulawesi, near the Chenrana River (even later, the Rank, which changed its name to Pamm', became part of the Bugi federal state of Wajo'). However, the word "China" can also be understood as Chinese - this meaning is given to this word in both the Bugian and Malay languages of Malaysia. This gives rise to the idea that Saverigading went to China. Abdul Rahman Al Ahmadi, a lecturer at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, writes in his article (pp. 193-202) that the folklore (late recorded) traditions of the Malays of the eastern Malacca peninsula speak of Saverigading's stay in these areas and that from there he went at the head of a group of Malays to Vietnam, which around the XIV century. He fought with China for its independence; there he allegedly participated in the Vietnamese struggle against China and made a brief military raid deep into China.

If the idea of Saverigading's struggle against the Chinese and his invasion of China is due to the ambiguity of place names, then the idea of his stay in Malaya appeared there thanks to the Bugians, with whom the Malays of Malaya had relations for a long time, undoubtedly before the Bugian conquests that took place in the XVIII century.

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Saverigading is widely known in Sulawesi outside of the Bugian regions. His image in different areas of this island - from the north to the south-east-is considered in five articles of the collection.

Undoubtedly, the peer-reviewed publication represents an important stage in the study of the largest monument of Bugian traditional literature, which is really on the way to becoming a world literary heritage. In this sense, the collection lives up to its name. It is a pity, however, that such an important and beautifully published book contains so many typos.

list of literature

Bulbeck D., Caldwell I. Land of Iron. The Historical Archaeology of Luwu and the Cenrana Valley... [Hull]. 2000.

Caldwell I. South Sulawesi A.D. 1300 - 1600: The Bugis texts. A thesis (...). The Australian National University. 1988.

Kern R.A. Catalogus van de Boegineesche, tot den I La Galigocyclus behoorende handschriften der Leidsche Universiteitsbibliotheek alsmede van die in andere Europeesche bibliotheken. Leiden: Universiteitsbibliotheek, 1939.

Koolhof S. Dutana Sawerigading; een scene uit de I La Galigo. Leiden, 1992.

Koolhof S., Tol R. (eds). La Galigo menurut naskah NBG 188 yang disusun oleh Arung Pancana Toa. Jakarta: Djambatan, 1995.

Matthes B.F. Boeginesche chrestomathie. Vol. III. Amsterdam: Spin, 1872.

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