scanty and confined to a comparatively small area; a central one, rich both in Sivaïte and Buddhist temples of the highest excellence; an eastern one, including Madura and Bali, illustrative of the island’s Hindu art in its decadence. Taking it roughly, the order is also chronologically from West to East, and to a certain extent we can trace the history of the remarkable people who improved so nobly upon the ideas they received from India, in the ruins they left to our wondering gaze. There has been a good deal of controversy respecting the date up to which the inhabitants of Java developed themselves on lines of aboriginal thought before the advent of the Hindus or, more correctly speaking, before Hindu influences became prevalent. In fact, there is hardly any question regarding the history of the island and its civilisation before the white conquerors carried everything before them, which has not given rise to controversy, and many important points are still very far from being settled—perhaps they never will be. In the face of such disagreement it behoves us to go warily and what follows hereafter rests but on arguments pro and contra deemed most plausible and founded principally on the accounts of the babads or Javanese chronicles,[2] always liable to correction when new discoveries with new wordy battles in their wake bring new light—if they do! Rude attempts at rock carving near Karang Bolong, Sukabumi, and Chitapen, Cheribon, are ascribed by some to artists of the pre-Hindu period. Professor J. H. C. Kern’s reading of inscriptions on four monoliths in Batavia, glorifications of a certain king Purnavarman, proves that the first Hindus of whom we have knowledge in Java, were Vaishnavas. Then comes a blank of several centuries while they made their way to Central and East Java where, however, when the veil is partly lifted, the Saivas predominate, almost swamping the rival sect. Fa Hien, the Chinese pilgrim who visited the island in 412 or 413, having suffered shipwreck on its coast, speaks of Brahmanism being in floribus and making converts, but complains of Buddhism as still of small account among the natives.

The strangers arrived in increasing numbers on the hospitable shores of the good and generous negri jawa, whose kindly reception of those adventurers is marvellously well represented on two of the sculptured slabs of the Boro Budoor, a tale of rescue from the dangers of the sea, a picture of the past and a prophetic vision of the welcome extended in later days also to Muhammadans and Christians—to be how repaid! The Hindus acquitted their debt of gratitude by building and carving with an energy, to quote James Fergusson, and to an extent nowhere surpassed in their native lands, dignifying their new home with imperishable records of their art and civilisation.... The Venggi inscriptions of the Diëng and the Kadu leave no doubt that the oldest manifestations of Hinduïsm in Central and West Java were intimately related and that the first strong infusion of the imported creed must have operated until 850 Saka (A.D. 928). In 654 Saka (A.D. 732), according to an inscription found at Changgal, Kadu, the ruler of the land bore a Sanskrit name and sacrificed to Siva, erecting a linga.[3] An inscription of 700 Saka (A.D. 778), found at Kalasan, Jogjakarta, is Buddhistic and confirms the evidence of many other records carved in stone and copper, of the oldest Javanese literature, last but not least of the temple ruins, all concurring in this that the two religions flourished side by side, the adoration of the Brahman triad, led by Siva, acquiring a tinge of the beatitude derived from emancipation through annihilation of self; Buddhism, in its younger mahayana form, becoming strongly impregnated with Sivaïsm, to the point even of endowing the Adi-Buddha in his five more tangible personifications with spouses and sons. Between two currents of faith, each imbued with the male and female principle in a country where the problem of sex will not be hid, it depended often upon a trifle what kind of emblematic shape the sculptor was going to give to his block of stone, whether he would carve a linga or a yoni,[4] a Dhyani Buddha, a Bodhisatva, a Tara or one of her Hindu peers.

Subsequent waves of immigration, the Muhammadan invasion, the Christian conquests, did little to nourish the artistic flame; on the contrary, they damped artistic ardour. Hereanent our historical data are somewhat more precise. The Islām takes its way to Sumatra in the wake of trade; conversions en masse seem to have first occurred in Pasei and Acheh, while merchants of Arabian and Persian nationality prepared its advent also in other regions of the north and later of the west coast. Marco Polo speaks of a Muhammadan principality in the North at the end of the thirteenth century; Ibn Batutah of several more in 1345; Acheh is fully islāmised under Sooltan Ali Moghayat Shah, 1507-1522; about the same time Menangkabau, ruled by maharajahs proud of their descent in the right line from Alexander the Great, Iskander Dzu’l Karnein, reaches its apogee as a formidable Moslim state and remains the stronghold of Malayan true believers until the fanaticism of the padris, stirred by the Wahabite movement, ends, in 1837, in the submission of the last Prince of Pagar Rujoong to the Dutch Government, which annexes his already much diminished empire. About 1400 the Islām had been introduced into Java, Zabej, as the Arabs called it, probably via Malacca and Sumatra, more especially Palembang. The oldest effort recorded was that of a certain Haji Poorwa in Pajajaran, but it appears not to have met with great success. Gresik in East Java, a port of call frequented by many oriental skippers, offered a better field for the religious zeal of Arab sailing-masters, supercargoes and tradesmen, every one of them a missionary too. Maulana Malik Ibrahim secured the largest following and was succeeded in his apostolic work by Raden Paku, who settled at Giri, not far from Gresik, whence his title of Susuhunan Giri, and by Raden Rahmat, who married a daughter of Angka Wijaya, King of Mojopahit, and founded a Muhammadan school at Ngampel, Surabaya. Their teachings resulted soon in the conversion of the population of the northeast coast of the island, where Demak, Drajat, Tuban, Kalinjamat and a few smaller vassal states of Mojopahit made themselves independent under Moslim princes or walis, who at last combined for a holy war against Hindu supremacy. They wiped Mojopahit in her idolatrous wickedness from the face of the earth and the leadership went to Demak, from which Pajang derived its political ascendency to merge later in Mataram. While the Islām spread from Giri in East and Central Java, even to Mataram and, crossing the water, to Madura, by the exertions of saintly men who “knew the future,” an Arab sheik, arriving at Cheribon, directly from foreign parts, at some time between 1445 and 1490, Noor ad-Din Ibrahim bin Maulana Israïl, better known as Sunan Gunoong Jati, undertook the conversion of West Java. And of Cheribon in her relation to the