The Singapore Stone is a fragment of a large sandstone slab which originally stood at the mouth of the Singapore River. The large slab, which is believed to date back to at least the 13th century and possibly as early as the 10th or 11th century, bore an undeciphered inscription. Recent theories suggest that the inscription is either in Old Javanese, Sanskrit or in Tamil, which suggested a possibility that the island was an extension of the Majapahit civilization in the past.
It is likely that the person who commissioned the inscription was Sumatran. The slab may be linked to the legendary story of the 14th-century strongman Badang, who is said to have thrown a massive stone to the mouth of the Singapore River. On Badang's death, the Rajah sent two stone pillars to be raised over his grave "at the point of the straits of Singapura".
The slab was blown up in 1843 during British colonial rule to clear and widen the passageway at the river mouth to make space for a fort and the quarters of its commander D.H. Stevenson. The Stone, now displayed at the National Museum of Singapore, was designated by the museum as one of 11 National Treasures of Singapore in January 2006, and by the National Heritage Board as one of the top 12 artefacts held in the collections of its museums.
Sandstone slab
Discovery In June 1819, a few months after the arrival of Sir Stamford Raffles (1781–1826) in Singapore, a sandstone slab about high and long was found by labourers clearing jungle trees at the southeast side of the mouth of the Singapore River. It stood at a promontory known as the Rocky Point, and later as Artillery Point, Fort Fullerton and the Master Attendant's Office. (In 1972, a short projection from the slab's site was constructed and a statue of an imaginary beast called the Merlion placed on it. The statue has since been relocated.) According to papers from the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal which were collected by Sir William Edward MaxwellSir William Edward Maxwell was Acting Governor of the Straits Settlements from 1893 to 1894. and republished in 1886,The papers were published by the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in the first volume of 2 vols. This work was reprinted by Routledge in 2000. one Dr. D.W. Montgomerie said that the rock was brought to light by some Bengal sailors employed by Captain Flint, R.N., the first Master Attendant:
The slab was inscribed with 50 or 52 lines of script, but by the time of its discovery the meaning of the inscription was already a mystery to the island's inhabitants. The information is referred to in .
Appearance John Crawfurd (1783–1868), who was Resident of Singapore, described the slab in his journal on 3 February 1822 in these terms:
James Prinsep (1799–1840), a scholar and antiquary who started the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, published a paper in the Journal in 1837 by a Dr. William BlandIt is not known whether this is the William Bland (1789–1868) who was a transported convict, medical practitioner and surgeon, politician, farmer and inventor in colonial New South Wales, Australia. of H.M.S. Wolf, which stated that he had made a facsimile of all that remained in any way perceptible on the slab.. Reprinted in Miscellaneous Papers Relating to Indo-China, above, vol. 1 at 219–220. Dr. Bland described the slab thus:
The inscription was engraved in rounded letters about three-quarters of an inch (1.9 cm) wide.Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, Hikayat Abdullah, above, at 167 n. 18.
Destruction About January 1843,Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, Hikayat Abdullah, above, at 166 n. 18. on the orders of the acting Settlement Engineer, Captain D.H. Stevenson, the slab was blown to pieces to clear and widen the passageway at the Singapore River mouth to make space for Fort Fullerton and the quarters of its commander. Some sources claim that the Superintendent of Public Works, George Drumgoole Coleman, was responsible for the Stone's destruction, but he was on leave and not in Singapore at the time of its blasting.According to A.H. Hill's translation of the Hikayat Abdullah: "Mr. Coleman was then engineer in Singapore and it was he who broke up the stone; a great pity, and in my opinion a most improper thing to do, prompted perhaps by his own thoughtlessness and folly. He destroyed the rock because he did not realize its importance. Perhaps he did not stop to consider that a man cleverer than he might extract its secrets from it... As the Malays say 'If you cannot improve a thing at least do not destroy it.'" Hill notes that the demolition was done on the orders of Captain Stevenson, who was acting as Settlement Engineer in January 1843, and not Coleman, who was not in Singapore at the time. According to Hill, "It is interesting to note that no name appears in Thomson's translation of this passage [reproduced below]; it looks as if Abdullah inserted Coleman's name erroneously, when revising his manuscript for publication by North": Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, Hikayat Abdullah, above, 166–167 n. 18. Lieutenant-Colonel James Low had petitioned to have the sandstone slab spared, but had been told that it was in the way of a projected bungalow. On the explosion taking place, he crossed the river from his office and selected fragments that had letters on them. As the fragments were very bulky, he had them chiselled into small slabs by a Chinese man. He selected some of the smaller fragments bearing the most legible parts of the inscription and sent them to the Royal Asiatic Society's museum in Calcutta (now known as the Indian Museum) for analysis,. Reprinted in Miscellaneous Papers Relating to Indo-China, above, vol. 1 at 223–226. where they arrived in about June 1848.
According to Maxwell's papers, when news of the destruction of the sandstone slab reached Bengal, James Prinsep asked the Governor of the Straits Settlements, Colonel William John Butterworth, to secure any legible fragments that might still exist and to send them to the Royal Asiatic Society's museum. Butterworth replied: "The only remaining portion of the stone you mention, except what Colonel Low may have, I have found lying in the verandah of the Treasury at Singapore, where it was used as a seat by the Sepoys of the guard and persons in waiting to transact business. I lost no time in sending it to my house, but, alas! not before the inscription was nearly erased. Such as the fragment was then however – i.e., in 1843 – it is now; for I have preserved the stone with much care, and shall have much pleasure in sending it for your museum, having failed to establish one, as I hoped to have done, in Singapore.", reprinted in Miscellaneous Papers Relating to Indo-China, above, vol. 1 at 222–223.
A large block from the monument lay abandoned at Government Hill until finally being broken up and used as gravel for a road. According to one W.H. Read, who arrived in Singapore in 1841:
D. W. Montgomerie, recalling that the Bengal sailors who had discovered the slab while clearing the jungle could not be persuaded to continue the work, commented: "What a pity it is that those who authorized the destruction of the ancient relic were not prevented by some such wholesome superstition!"
In 1918, the Raffles Museum and Library's Committee of Management asked the Royal Asiatic Society's museum in Calcutta to return the fragments of the sandstone slab, and the Calcutta museum agreed to send one fragment back to the museum.Rouffaer, "Was Malakka emporium voor 1400 A.D. genaamd Malajoer?", above, at 58, citing The information is referred to in Miksic, Forbidden Hill, above, at 42 n. 1. Archaeologist John N. Miksic has said that "presumably the other pieces are still in Calcutta".Miksic, Forbidden Hill, above, at 42 n. 1.
Inscription and attempts at decipherment Several scholars tried, over time, to better understand the extant text of the Singapore Stone and, ultimately, to decipher it. The sub-sections below provide a summary of those decipherment proposals.
Sir Stamford Raffles Raffles himself tried to decipher the inscriptions on the original sandstone slab."[I]t was almost universally known that many had attempted to decipher the writing in question, and had failed to make anything of it, among whom was one of great eminence and perseverance, the late Sir S. Raffles.": Bland, "Inscription on the Jetty at Singapore", above, at 680–682, reprinted in Miscellaneous Papers Relating to Indo-China, above, vol. 1 at 219–220. In his 1834 work, The Malay Peninsula, Captain Peter James Begbie of the Madras Artillery, part of the Honourable East India Company, wrote:
In the Hikayat Abdullah, Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir (1796–1854), also known as Munshi Abdullah, recorded Raffles taking missionary Rev. Claudius Henry Thomsen and himself to see what Raffles described as a "remarkable stone" in October 1822. Raffles apparently took the view that the writing had to be Hindu "because the Hindus were the oldest of all immigrant races in the East, reaching Java and Bali and Siam, the inhabitants of which are all descended from them".Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, Hikayat Abdullah, above, at 165–166. The full passage reads:In an earlier translation by John Turnbull Thomson, the passage reads thus:See
William Bland and James Prinsep (Pali)
In his note published in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal of 1837, Dr. William Bland reported that he had "frequently made pilgrimages" to the Stone, "determined, if it were possible, to save a few letters, could they be satisfactorily made out, to tell us something, however, small, of the language or the people who inscribed it, and hence eke out our limited and obscure knowledge of the Malayan Peninsula."
With the assistance of a "clever native writer", Bland used "well-made and soft dough" to take impressions of the characters on the slab to copy them. After an impression of each character had been made, the character itself in the stone was painted over with white lead, "as far as the eye could make it out, ... and if the two agreed, it was considered as nearly correct as possible, and although this was done to all the characters, it was more particularly attended to in the more obscure ones, for the letters marked in the facsimile with more strength could readily be copied by the eye." Bland also discovered that when the Stone was viewed "when the sun was descending in the west, a palpable shadow was thrown into the letter, from which great assistance was derived."
In Bland's view, "speaking from a very limited knowledge of the subject", the inscription was in "the ancient Ceylonese, or Pálí". James Prinsep concurred, saying that although he could not venture to put together any connected sentences or even words, "some of the letters – the g, l, h, p, s, y, &c. – can readily be recognised, as well as many of the vowel marks". He expressed the opinion that the purpose of the inscription "is most probably to record the extension of the Buddhist faith to that remarkable point of the Malay Peninsula".
Peter James Begbie's speculative theory (Tamil)