is one of the 300-odd islands of the Republic of Indonesia.
It is not the largest—Borneo-Kalimantan and Sumatra are much
bigger. Java is even smaller than Britain, the largest of
the British Isles, but it has almost twice the population.
With about 100 million people it is one of the most densely
populated areas in the world, making Javanese the twelfth
most spoken language in the world.
and culturally, Java is and always has been the chief island
of that vast archipelago called Insulinde (“Islands of the
Indies”), or, in Sanskrit, Nusantara (“Islands of the East”).
Altogether, natives of the Indonesian islands speak over 300
languages, all of which are related except those in Irian
and the interior of New Guinea.
all these languages, Old Javanese is the oldest known; it
flourished in the Middle Ages, during the same centuries as
Anglo-Saxon. Javanese has its own script of elegant characters,
originally based on Sanskrit, and is closely related to Malay-Indonesian
but it is quite distinct, as English is from German. The Javanese
have very extensive literature in prose and poetry dating
from the early Middle Ages, much of it available only in manuscripts,
unpublished and unknown, in the libraries of Java. From these
manuscripts—among which are chronicles, long poems, and much
more—the present collection of fables was taken as an example
of early Oriental wit and wisdom.
Javanese people colonized the island before the birth of Christ.
Indian merchants, adventurers, and Brahmin priests settled
there during the early centuries of the Christian era, creating
the Hindu-Javanese civilization as they blended with the populace.
Later, Buddhist teachers arrived, and by about A.D. 800, Java
was a center of Buddhist learning and literature, radiating
toward Siam and Cambodia.
the ninth century the Borobudur was founded as an open-air
temple for study and meditation. It was perhaps in those prosperous
years that the manuscript was written from which the present
collection of fables was chosen. It is not a literal translation
from the famous Sanskrit works Panchatantra and
Hitophadesha but rather was written after the stories
had functioned as folktales for many years, which explains
why the work now has typical Javanese features, such as Javanese
names for some of the characters and animals, which are not
found in the Indian literature. This course of development
is what makes these tales so fresh and original, and yet so