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II The chronicle texts 21
what is told of him’ (kontuminne kana-kanana). It could be argued that these
are the kinds of textual transformations one might expect in the chronicles as
Makassarese increasingly lived in a world in which the past was associated
with and contained in prestigious written texts.
4 The most evident type of structural change in the chronicles is the incorporation
of new sections (most often blocks of genealogical information),
particularly at the end of the two chronicles. These additions presumably
reflect the ancestral history of the families who possessed and preserved
the manuscripts. During the Talloq chronicle’s account of Karaeng Matoaya,
for example, CM 197-198 and, according to Matthes (n26), NBG 16 add an
entire genealogy about Karaeng Popoq’s descendants. It begins with the last
phrase in the Indonesian translation of the Talloq chronicle section 145 (iami
anjangangngi Tumakkajannangnganga) and continues until the end of section
159 (sikammaminjo anaqna Karaenga ri Popoq). Chapter V’s Appendix 1 to the
Gowa chronicle represents another such structural modification.
5 There is an increasing tendency to lengthen the dating sections that describe
important events using Western and Arabic calendrical systems. There is in
fact considerable variation in how each manuscript writer records dates. No
two are identical, though later manuscripts (especially CM) tend to be the
longest and most elaborate.
Like any textual tradition, the patturioloang genre displays patterns of growth
and change that become evident when extant manuscripts are compared.
Strikingly, however, there is no textual variation to such an extent that we
must consider any of the texts analysed for this translation as anything but
recognizable Gowa and Talloq chronicle texts. The two earliest external
descriptions of the chronicles date from 1670 and 1759. Cornelis Speelman
described what is clearly the Gowa chronicle shortly after the VOC and Bugis
conquest of Makassar in his 1670 ‘Notitie’ (Speelman 1670). Roelof Blok
(1848) provided a more detailed account of the Gowa chronicle some ninety
years later. What is striking is that these early descriptions closely resemble
chronicle texts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There was, in
other words, a high degree of stability in the process of transmitting chronicles
for three centuries.
We have no external evidence describing the production of chronicles in
pre-colonial Makassar, and are thus left to speculate on many issues. One
such issue involved the relationship between the Gowa and Talloq chronicles.
Noorduyn (1991:455) suggested that the two be treated as a single work,
though this conclusion is based only on two instances in which the Gowa
chronicle refers to the Talloq chronicle. In the first, the Gowa chronicle in BL