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II The chronicle texts 23
where the chronicle’s composers explicitly relied on oral testimony from others.
In some cases this is anonymous, but in other cases we are told who the
chronicler received information from. In every example of this, the informant
comes from Talloq. In the Talloq chronicle, Karaeng Matoaya (the seventh ruler
of Talloq) reports that it was Tumamenang ri Makkoayang (the fourth ruler of
Talloq) who made the famous pronouncement that Gowa and Talloq are ‘just
one people, but two karaeng’. Later, Karaeng Pattingalloang (Tumamenang ri
Bontobiraeng, the ninth ruler of Talloq) recalls what Karaeng Matoaya told
him. Additionally, the Loqmoq ri Paotereka (located in Talloq) provided a
description of Karaeng Matoaya’s Islamic piety. Finally, the origin story of
Talloq is related by I Daeng ri Buloa in Talloq. It is of course not surprising
that the composers of the Talloq chronicle relied on local informants, but in
the one case where the Gowa chronicle quotes the words of an informant, it is
again Karaeng Pattingalloang recalling that Sultan Ala’uddin (the fourteenth
ruler of Gowa) married more than forty times. Internal textual evidence
indicating the importance of informants from Talloq also matches the argument
that Anthony Reid (1981) has made based on European sources about
the relative intellectual importance of the rulers of Talloq, Karaeng Matoaya
and Karaeng Pattingalloang during the seventeenth century. Their accomplishments
and interest in learning could well have fostered an atmosphere
at the Talloq court more conducive to writing chronicles than the rulers of
Gowa provided. Unfortunately, like so many issues involving Makassarese
texts, this must remain a hypothesis until when and if further information is
uncovered.
In addition to speculating about where the chronicles were composed,
we can also suggest something of how they were transmitted. Ian Caldwell
and Campbell Macknight (2001) suggested that Bugis texts were copied
orally. That is, a reader may have recited the source text while a scribe wrote
the words down in a new text, or possibly a scribe may have read aloud
one text and then written down those words in a new text himself. There
is information suggesting this was the case with Makassarese chronicles as
well. To begin, the wide variation in spelling of simple words such as siagang
(siag, siyg, siagaG, and siygG) meaning ‘with or together’ hints
that as one person recited the text the writer simply wrote down the word as
he or she typically spelled it, a variation made possible by the nature of the
Makassarese script. This is also true of other terms, such as kasuwiang, which
is spelled in six different ways: ksuwia, ksuwiy, ksuaia, ksuaiy,
ksia, and ksiwia. These examples could be multiplied almost indefinitely.
In general, it is not uncommon for ‘e’ and ‘i’ vowels and ‘o’ and ‘u’
vowels to be used interchangeably to record spoken Makassarese sounds.
These variations suggest that what was important to Makassarese was the
ability to re-speak the words recorded on paper, not the spelling of indi-