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Seals (Numismatics)

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Seals (Numismatics)

The Malay Seal: A Sigillographic Tradition

The Malay seal—defined as a seal from Southeast Asia bearing an inscription in Arabic script—constitutes one of the most significant categories of primary source material for the history of the Malay archipelago. The largest corpus to date, a catalogue of 2,168 such seals, spans from the second half of the sixteenth century to the early twentieth century and draws on holdings from over seventy public and sixty private collections worldwide, including institutions in Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, Singapore, and the United Kingdom [1, p. 2]. The seals originate from present-day Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, Indonesia, and the southern parts of Thailand, Cambodia and the Philippines, reflecting the extent of the Malay lingua franca and Islamic cultural sphere in maritime Southeast Asia [1, p. 2]. Their principal function was to identify the seal owner and to locate him or her within their social, political and spiritual universe, an identity evoked through an iteration of title and/or personal name, sometimes accompanied by a pedigree, a place name, a date, a religious expression, and an amuletic formula imbued with protective powers [1, pp. 1–2].

Scope and Historical Definition

The corpus of 2,168 seals encompasses a wide range of social and political statuses. Of the total, 655 are sovereign seals, representing 30 per cent of the whole, while the remainder include seals of office, personal seals, and seals of patronage [1, pp. 1–3]. The title sultan appears on 462 of the 655 sovereign seals—70 per cent—establishing it as the unifying marker of Muslim kingship across the region [1, pp. 1–3]. However, the adoption of the title was neither automatic nor universal. In Banten it was granted by the Grand Sharif of Mecca in 1638, in Mataram in 1641, and in Johor only in 1885 after protracted negotiations with the British [1, pp. 6–7]. The indigenous title Yang Dipertuan (‘he who is made lord’) is identified as the only unambiguous indicator of absolute political authority, and its absence from a seal could signal that a ruler had not undergone formal coronation or held a junior position in a dualistic system of government [1, pp. 5–10].

The structural components of royal inscriptions fall into three categories: prefatory honorifics of Sanskrit origin (seri, paduka, duli), the title proper of the ruler, and sovereign epithets drawn from the caliphal and Persian traditions that served to confirm and magnify the ruler’s status [1, pp. 1–3]. The honorifics bawah and duli appear exclusively on Brunei sovereign seals (19 and 13 respectively), a fact that enabled the identification of the patron of a seal from the chief of Kalis in Kalimantan Barat as Sultan Abdul Mumin of Brunei (r. 1852–85) [1, p. 4].

Beyond the sovereign sphere, seals served as instruments of administrative authority and personal identification. In Negeri Sembilan, for example, the Undang of Rembau’s seal functioned as a seal of office in which the filiative ibn (son) was used symbolically to indicate succession in office rather than biological descent; the same seal was used by two different incumbents with different dates [2, pp. 4–5]. The Penghulu (chief) of Jelebu and the Penghulus of Johol and Inas similarly used seals of office that passed between successive holders [2, pp. 4–19].

Titles of Kingship and Sovereign Epithets

The dissemination of caliphal epithets across the archipelago represents one of the most revealing aspects of Malay sigillography. Zill Allah fi al-ʿalam (‘the shadow of God in the world’) appears on 48 seals across the archipelago, most densely on 19 Acehnese sovereign seals, with the earliest documented occurrences in the second half of the seventeenth century [1, pp. 12–13]. By the early twentieth century, the most extravagant caliphal epithets had largely disappeared from seal inscriptions, a shift attributed to the puritanical movement that gained momentum in the early nineteenth century [1, p. 14].

A particularly distinctive compound epithet, johan berdaulat (‘the champion endowed with sovereign power’), originated in Aceh during the reign of Iskandar Muda (r. 1607–36) and was subsequently adopted by all male rulers of that state [1, pp. 14–17]. It is found on 21 seals of male Acehnese sovereigns and is absent from all dirhams (coins) issued before Iskandar Muda’s reign, confirming its institutionalisation during his rule [1, pp. 14–17]. The epithet subsequently appears on seals from Perak, Inderapura and Minangkabau, likely through Acehnese influence [1, pp. 14–17].

The political tensions inherent in dualistic or tripartite sovereignty are also visible in the seal record. In Johor, following the 1722 Malay–Bugis agreement, three office-holders simultaneously bore the title sultan—the Malay Yang Dipertuan, the Bugis Raja Tua, and the Bugis Yang Dipertuan Muda—a configuration that the seal inscriptions make tangible in a way that narrative sources often obscure [1, p. 10]. Seals also function as stern guardians of official dignity: in several cases the title used in the body of a letter exceeds what the accompanying seal actually claims, revealing a gap between aspirational self-presentation and the more conservative language of the seal itself [1, p. 8].

The Negeri Sembilan Seals and the Minangkabau Question

The 27 documented seals of Negeri Sembilan provide a critical case study in the interaction between Malay and Minangkabau sigillographic traditions. Negeri Sembilan, settled by Minangkabau immigrants from at least the sixteenth century and long a fiefdom of the Johor Bendahara (chief minister), sits at the confluence of two distinct traditions: the Malay tradition of personal official seals, in which the inscription names a specific individual with pedigree and date, and the Minangkabau tradition, in which royal seals bear symbolic regnal names that designate the institution of kingship rather than any particular ruler [2, pp. 1–3].

A central finding of the scholarship on these seals is that the name “Sultan Abdul Jalil Muazzam Syah” cited on several of them is a symbolic Minangkabau regnal name representing the institution of kingship, not a reference to the Johor prince who died in 1761 [2, pp. 23–24]. This identification, first made by R. J. Wilkinson in his 1911 “Notes on the Negeri Sembilan,” had been used to date the creation of various offices to c.1760, but it was driven by peninsula-centric assumptions and the paucity of information on Minangkabau history [2, pp. 23–24]. The four Sungai Ujong seals cite a patron “Sultan Muhammad Jalil” who is not a known Johor sultan; this is best understood as a variant of the Minangkabau symbolic name, undermining earlier descriptions of him as a Johor ruler [2, p. 18].

Raja Ali’s 1811 seal (catalogue number 267) is a classic Minangkabau seal of patronage of Sumatran manufacture, naming “Sultan Abdul Muhyiuddin of Jambi” as recipient; three other seals with the same shape and inscription exist in Minangkabau, none linked to the named recipient, demonstrating the non-referential use of Minangkabau seals [2, pp. 6]. The 1876 treaty’s final article, which mandated a new seal for Tunku Antah without the title “Sultan,” was a unique marker in Malay sigillographic history and likely served the interests of the Maharaja of Johor, who had not yet attained the title himself [2, pp. 14–15]. The High Commissioner’s 1909 ruling that the title “Sultan” had lapsed for Negeri Sembilan reflected a colonial redefinition of the term as denoting an absolute ruler, inconsistent with the state’s own historical practice in which multiple officeholders had used the title [2, pp. 15–16].

Research and Documentation

The study of Malay seals in the Society’s literature has evolved from brief notices of individual specimens to systematic corpus-based analysis. The earliest contribution in the available records is R. Braddell’s 1935 note on the Perak “Pallava seal” [3], and K. A. Nilakanta Sastri’s 1936 note on an inscribed seal from Perak [4], both of which represent the older mode of sigillographic scholarship: the description and interpretation of a single artefact. The first published reproductions of Malay seals appeared in Newbold’s 1835–36 publications, establishing a precedent for visual documentation that subsequent scholars would extend [2, Archival Notes].

The historiographical significance of the seals was first fully articulated in the context of Negeri Sembilan. Wilkinson’s 1911 identification of the seal names with a specific Johor ruler set a chronological framework that persisted for decades, and Winstedt’s subsequent dismissal of the 1826 credentials brought from Sumatra by Raja Labu as “ludicrous” was a direct consequence of the same error [2, pp. 23–24]. It was not until Annabel Teh Gallop’s 2013 article that the Minangkabau symbolic nature of these names was demonstrated with the full weight of comparative evidence, fundamentally challenging the chronological framework that Wilkinson and subsequent scholars had built [2, pp. 1–32].

The publication in 2019 of a comprehensive catalogue of 2,168 Malay seals by the British Library’s catalogue project marked a decisive shift from artefact-by-artefact description to quantitative, corpus-based analysis [1, p. 2]. Gallop’s 2020 article on sovereign titles drew on this catalogue to establish patterns of epithet dissemination, the geographic distribution of honorifics, and the political semantics of title usage across the archipelago [1, pp. 1–22]. The shift in priorities is evident: where earlier scholarship asked “what does this seal say?” the current phase asks “what does the pattern of 2,168 seals tell us about the political and religious history of the Malay world?” The seals, once treated as curiosities or isolated epigraphic specimens, have become a primary source of the first order for the history of Muslim kingship in maritime Southeast Asia.

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. A.T. Gallop (2020). Sovereign signs: titles of kingship on Malay seals JMBRAS 93(1): 1–22.
  2. A.T. Gallop (2013). Seals as sources for the history of Negri Sembilan JMBRAS 86(2): 1–32.
  3. R. Braddell (1935). The Perak “Pallava seal” JMBRAS 13(2): 110.
  4. K.A. Nilakanta Sastri (1936). A note on an inscribed seal from Perak JMBRAS 14(3): 282–283.