A CHAIN OF KINGS - Books and Journals

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A chain of kings
middle of the seventeenth century. Each of these may have been copied over
the centuries. Indeed, the sheer varieties of endings for the Gowa chronicle
(only KIT and VT are the same) indicate the complexity of the problem.
Nevertheless, we are fortunate to have eighteenth-century copies of BL
and KIT upon which to base a translation. This edition uses BL as a base text.
This is the oldest surviving complete text of the Gowa and Talloq chronicles.
KIT is next in importance, and in several cases it is used as the basis for alternate
readings included in the translation. As BL does not contain the reign of
Sultan Hasanuddin, and because of the desirability of including this in the
translation, KIT is the base text for this section. Extensive comments compare
the readings in BL and where applicable KIT to the other manuscripts listed
above, noting significant differences to the base text.
In addition to the significant differences treated in the notes to the translations,
there are abundant minor variations among the extant versions of the
chronicles. In fact, a large percentage of the changes discovered in the different
chronicle manuscripts are the inevitable result of scribal inattention. Ian
Proudfoot (1984) calls these the ‘white noise’ of scribal transmission: the syntactical
and semantic changes that were not intended to change the meaning
of a text. These differences are not noted elsewhere, so it is worth discussing
them briefly here. In his discussion of Indonesian philology (1988), Stuart
Robson divided minor textual errors that crop up in the process of copying
into five categories: mistakenly writing one letter for another similar letter;
accidentally omitting a letter, word, or phrase (lipography); inadvertently
adding a letter, word, or phrase; accidentally transposing letters, words, or
phrases; deliberately choosing a word or phrase if the copyist believed the
source text was incorrect.
To this list we can add dittography (unintentional repetition of a word
or letter), which is encountered occasionally in the chronicle texts, though
its opposite haplography (inadvertent failure to repeat a word or letter that
should be doubled) is quite rare. Lipography is more frequently encountered.
Variation in spelling (orthography) is especially common. Another
common type of variation between different manuscripts of the Gowa and
Talloq chronicles is the chirographic variation in how each writer formed letters
(Noorduyn 1993). This is particularly evident in texts written using the
‘Old Makassarese’ or jangang-jangang script. Particular letters may be written
in very different ways in each text; the newer lontaraq beru script is far more
standardized and presents few difficulties. Variations in jangang-jangang letters
can usually be quickly deciphered, though occasionally this can pose
other difficulties. In KIT 668/216, for example, only slight graphic differences
separate how this writer made the letters ‘pa’ and ‘la’ (and occasionally ‘sa’)
on the one hand, and ‘ga’ and ‘da’ on the other. All of these mistakes are
found in the eight texts used in this edition to one degree or another, but