Article

Tombs and tombstones

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Tombs and tombstones

Scope and Historical Definition

The funerary monuments of the Malay Peninsula and Borneo constitute a diverse material record spanning at least five centuries, encompassing Islamic tombstones, Christian cemetery inscriptions, megalithic slab-graves, and genealogical tablets. These objects range from the prehistoric slab-graves of the Bernam valley, which Wilkinson argued predate the Christian era [1], to the Protestant Cemetery in Northam Road, Penang, one of the oldest Christian burial grounds in Malaya [2]. The subject is significant both as a primary source for the social, political, and religious history of the region and as a field of active scholarly debate concerning cultural attribution, iconographic meaning, and calendrical accuracy.

The term “tombstone” in the literature covers a wide typological range. Islamic examples include the Achehnese-type head and foot-stones of Pahang [3], the Batu Aceh class of fine-grained sandstone steles associated with Pasai [4], and the slab-graves of the Bernam and Sumatra [1], [5]. Christian monuments comprise imported marble and granite tablets from Calcutta [2] and the domed pavilion erected for Resident Parr at Bencoolen [6]. The Batu Tarsilah of Brunei, a sandstone genealogical tablet set on a substantial base, represents a distinct category of dynastic commemorative monument [7].

Islamic Tombstones and the Batu Aceh Tradition

The earliest dated Islamic tombstone yet discovered in Pahang is the epitaph of Muhammad Shah I, the first Sultan of Pahang, found at Dusun Pinang on the eastern bank of the Pahang Tua river. The Achehnese-type stones, each inscribed on all four sides, record his death on 16 Jumada al-Awwal 880 AH (17 September 1475 AD) and provide a genealogy—Muhammad Shah, son of Sultan Mansur Shah, son of Muzaffar Shah, son of Muhammad Shah—that independently corroborates three Malacca Sultans named in the Sejarah Melayu [3, pp. 188–189]. Linehan noted a striking palaeographic difference between the Quranic texts, rendered in thick, ungainly script without diacritical marks, and the epitaph itself, which is finer and well-shaped, suggesting the stones were produced in a workshop with pre-inscribed Quranic panels [3, p. 191]. He raised the possibility that the stones had been removed from a recognised royal burial ground in Pekan Lama, citing the absence of a tumulus and the complete ignorance of their existence among local inhabitants [3, p. 191].

A second Pahang royal stone, that of Raja Fatimah, was found in the Pahang River near Tebing Tinggi and presented to the Tungku Besar in May 1910. Measuring 22¾ inches high and carved from pyroxene-hornblende-andesite, it records her death on 15 Shawal 901 AH (AD 1496), fifteen years before Albuquerque’s capture of Malacca [8, pp. 37–38]. Barnes identified her as daughter of Sultan Ala’edin Riayat Shah of Malacca and wife of Raja Mansur of Pahang, and noted that, so far as he was aware, the stone was the oldest dated gravestone in the Peninsula [8, p. 38].

The Batu Aceh typology, first identified on the tombstones of Sultan Malik as-Saleh of Pasai (d. 1297), is characterised by fine-grained sandstone steles divided into crown, stem, and base [4, pp. 90]. Bougas examined two pairs of such stones at Kubo Barahom, the oldest surviving Islamic cemetery in Patani, South Thailand, located approximately six kilometres east of the present town near the site of the 16th-century settlement [4, p. 85]. The stones measure 59 cm × 19.5 cm × 9.5 cm (Set A) and 45 cm × 19.5 cm × 9.5 cm (Set B), and bear repeated shahadah text and Quranic verses directed inward toward the grave, functioning as prayers for recitation by visitors [4, pp. 93–94]. Bougas argued that the Hindu-Buddhist lotus and Mount Meru motifs carved on the stone crowns were not merely decorative survivals but carried a coherent cosmological meaning—death as cosmic destruction and regeneration—that was reinterpreted within an Islamic framework during Patani’s Islamisation [4]. He dated the stones to a transitional stage prior to or around 1520, placing them between Othman bin Mohd Yatim’s Period 1 (1297–1520) and Period 2 (1520–1606) [4, pp. 96–97].

In the Raffles Museum, Singapore, Winstedt documented several Muslim tombstones with the assistance of M. Moquette’s unpublished decipherments. The earliest, attributed to Nakhoda Haji al-Kanbaiy, a sea-captain pilgrim from Cambay, is dated 9 Shawal AH 863 (9 August 1459 AD); Winstedt considered it almost certain that the stones came from the old Fort wall at Malacca, presented to the Museum by the Resident Councillor in 1852 [9, p. 6]. A second stone records the death of Ismail son of Haji Nasru’d-din on 5 Dhu’l-Qa’dah AH 884 (18 January 1480 AD), with the inscription noting the day as Friday though the date actually fell on a Tuesday—an error Winstedt observed to be common [9, p. 7].

Christian and Colonial Funerary Monuments

The Protestant Cemetery in Northam Road, Penang, and the memorial tablets of St. George’s Church (built 1817, consecrated 1819) form the subject of the Bastins’ 1964 epigraphic survey, which records approximately ninety inscriptions spanning deaths from 1789 to the 1890s [2, pp. 126–165]. The collection documents the lives of Penang’s early governors, civil servants, military officers, merchants, and missionaries, reflecting the multi-national character of the settlement. Among the most historically significant figures commemorated are Francis Light, the founder of the settlement (d. 1794); John Alexander Bannerman, Governor and Lieutenant Colonel in the East India Company’s service for forty-three years (d. 1819); and the shared monument of John Hope Oliphant and Philip Dundas, both of whom died in 1807 [2]. The Oliphant–Dundas monument records that Dundas died “a few weeks after the decease of his Wife Margaret Wedderburn, a lady of the sweetest Temper and the softest Manners”; both were from the Scottish Borders [2].

The sculptors and stone-cutters named across the Penang monuments—Simpson & Llewelyn, Philip Hunt, Coombs & Co, Brown & Co, John Hall, W. Myers, Lindeman & Co, and Dan. C.P. Perreau—were all based in Calcutta, indicating that the cemetery’s monuments were imported from India rather than produced locally [2]. At least two inscriptions are in German: those of Wladislaus Nowinski (born Warsaw 1845, died Penang 1884) and Otto Ruegger (born Aarburg January 1848, died Penang April 1890), both marked “HIER RUHT” [2]. The Bastins conducted their survey during a brief two-day window in late January 1963, when a delayed departure of the S.S. Chusan afforded them the opportunity to record the inscriptions before leaving Malaya; several stones were already broken or set into the graveyard wall, and a number of inscriptions were partially illegible [2].

At Bencoolen (modern Bengkulu, Sumatra), Brooks surveyed the physical remains of the early English settlement (1685–1824) through its funerary architecture. Of 73 tombs examined, 46 bear no inscription, a fact Brooks found difficult to explain despite the presence of recesses for tablets in nearly every case [6, p. 51]. The earliest inscribed grave is dated 1775 [6, p. 51]. The most prominent monument is the domed pavilion erected for Resident Thomas Parr, who was assassinated in 1805 at Mt. Felix, approximately three miles south of Fort Marlborough [6, p. 50]. The pavilion stands in the town’s main market area and was erected by the native population at government order following his death [6]. Brooks also recorded the obelisk to Captain Robert Hamilton (d. 15 December 1793), three altar tombs in Fort Marlborough, and a numbered cemetery divided into three sections containing at least 29 identified English or early-origin burials [6, pp. 52–53].

Megalithic Slab-Graves and the Prehistoric Record

The slab-graves of the Bernam valley in Perak and their counterparts in Sumatra and Java represent a distinct category of prehistoric funerary monument. Wilkinson, writing in 1939, challenged the prevailing “Greater India” interpretation by arguing that the Bernam slab-graves were the product of an indigenous megalithic civilisation predating the Christian era, not the work of Indian traders [1]. He dismissed the Indian hypothesis on the ground that Hindus and Buddhists practised cremation and did not build slab-graves or deposit beads in them [1]. His argument drew on comparative evidence from South Sumatra, where slab-graves of the same type, containing beads, broken pottery, and occasionally iron or bronze tools, have been found across the island, sometimes far from the coast and therefore unlikely to be the work of passing traders [1]. The finest example was found at Pagar Alam in the Pasumah country, associated with a megalithic culture featuring carved stone reliefs of beardless men riding elephants, driving buffaloes, and beating kettledrums [1].

The dating argument rests on Han dynasty artefacts. Wilkinson reported that two bronze tools of Han type and many pieces of Han pottery had been found in Southern Sumatra, including one piece dated to the fourth year of the Han Emperor Yuan-ti (BC 45), making it the oldest dated relic in Indonesia [1, p. 135]. A full-sized bronze drum of the Pasumah type was found on the Danau Gadang tea-estate by Korinchi lake, along with beads, broken pottery, and bronze artefacts similar to those in slab-graves [1, p. 135].

Winstedt, writing in 1941, synthesised a decade of scattered reports and evaluated competing hypotheses with explicit methodological caution. The material evidence is consistent across sites: no skeletal remains, coarse pottery fragments, glass and stone beads, and iron implements—socketed tools in Malaya, adze-type implements in Java [5, p. 93]. The absence of gold in any grave is noted as a significant negative datum, undermining Braddell’s hypothesis that the Perak graves lay on a route to Pahang gold-mines [5, p. 95]. Winstedt raised objections to Wilkinson’s Indo-Chinese (Mon) origin, including the absence of bronze in the Malayan graves and the fact that only one megalithic burial vault is known from Indo-China itself [5]. He countered Wilkinson’s dismissal of the Indian hypothesis by citing Cumming’s survey of South Indian Iron Age burial sites, whose assemblages overlap considerably with the slab-grave finds, and noted that iron reached southern India by approximately 500 BC [5]. Yet he stopped short of endorsing any single attribution, concluding that the origin of the graves remains genuinely unresolved [5].

The Batu Tarsilah and Dynastic Commemoration

The Batu Tarsilah of Brunei, a sandstone tablet inscribed in Jawi script recording the succession of Brunei’s sultans, represents a distinct form of dynastic commemorative monument. Measuring approximately 4 feet high by 3½ feet wide by 6 inches thick, it is set on a base about 4 feet high and 20 feet square [7, p. 87]. Shariffuddin and Ibrahim’s 1974 re-examination addressed a century-old dating error in Hugh Low’s 1880 transcription, demonstrating that the tablet’s closing date—2 Zulhijjah, AH 1221, Arba’ (Wednesday)—was wrongly rendered by Low as AD 1804, whereas the correct Gregorian equivalent is 8 February 1807 [7, pp. 90–91]. They further corrected the death date of Sultan Mohammad Jamalul Alam recorded on his tombstone, arguing that Low had omitted the word sembilan (nine) and that the correct reading is AH 1219, yielding a death date of 6 Sha’ban, AH 1219 = 10 November 1804 [7, pp. 94–95]. The tablet also reveals a political lacuna: it omits Sultan Abdul Mubin, the thirteenth sultan, who overthrew and executed Sultan Mohammad Ali, underscoring that the tablet was a product of a particular political moment—commissioned by Sultan Mohammad Tajuddin as a dynastic legitimising document rather than a neutral chronicle [5, p. 91, n. 10].

Research and Documentation

The Society’s literature on tombs and tombstones reveals a progression from colonial-era field documentation to philological and iconographic analysis. The earliest contributions—Barnes’s brief note on Raja Fatimah’s stone (1911) [8], Brooks’s survey of Bencoolen (1918) [6], and Linehan’s discovery at Pahang Tua (1926) [3]—were written by colonial administrators acting as both discoverer and interpreter, enlisting local and external scholarly assistance in a manner typical of the period’s collaborative antiquarian practice. These articles functioned primarily as descriptive records, preserving inscriptions and physical appearances before further weathering or loss.

The 1930s and 1940s saw the emergence of interpretive debate. Wilkinson’s 1939 article on the Bernam slab-graves [1] and Winstedt’s 1941 synthesis [5] marked a shift from mere documentation to the evaluation of competing cultural attributions, with Winstedt’s explicit methodological caution against premature attribution anticipating later, more rigorous approaches to South and Southeast Asian prehistory. The Bastins’ 1964 survey of Penang [2] and Ch’ng and Mintz’s sequel (1987) [10] continued the epigraphic tradition for Christian monuments, while Bougas’s 1986 study of the Patani tombstones [4] introduced iconographic and cosmological analysis, linking Malay funerary material culture to the broader Batu Aceh tradition and to the historiography of Islamisation in Southeast Asia.

The most recent contribution, Shariffuddin and Ibrahim’s 1974 re-examination of the Batu Tarsilah [7], introduced a methodological precedent for verifying Jawi-inscribed dates through astronomical computation rather than accepting earlier transcriptions at face value, correcting a foundational dating error that had been reproduced in the Brunei Annual Reports (1960–1966) and in Sweeney’s earlier work. Across the full span of the literature, the Society’s journal has served as the principal venue for the documentation, transcription, and critical analysis of the region’s funerary monuments, with the physical stones themselves remaining the sole primary source in most cases.

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. R.J. Wilkinson (1939). The Bernam slab-graves JMBRAS 17(1): 134–143. Read on JSTOR
  2. C. Bastin and J.S. Bastin (1964). Some old Penang tombstones. C. Bastin and J. Bastin JMBRAS 37(1): 126–165. Read on JSTOR
  3. W. Linehan (1926). Tomb-stones of Mahmud Shah I of Pahang JMBRAS 4(2): 188–192. Read on JSTOR
  4. W.A. Bougas (1986). Some early Islamic tombstones in Patani JMBRAS 59(1): 85–112.
  5. R.O. Winstedt (1941). Slab-graves and iron implements JMBRAS 19(1): 93–98. Read on JSTOR
  6. C.J. Brooks (1918). English tombs and monuments in Bencoolen JSBRAS 78: 51–58. Read on JSTOR
  7. Abdul Latif bin Haji Ibrahim and P.M. Shariffuddin (1974). Batu Tarsilah: the genealogical tablet of the Sultans of Brunei. Pengiran M. Shariffuddin and Abdul Latif bin Haji Ibrahim JMBRAS 47(1): 87–95. Read on JSTOR
  8. W.D. Barnes (1911). An old royal tombstone in Pahang JSBRAS 60: 37–39. Read on JSTOR
  9. R.O. Winstedt (1932). Muslim tombstones in Raffles Museum JMBRAS 10(1): 6–8. Read on JSTOR
  10. D. Ch’ng and M.W. Mintz (1987). Some old Penang tombstones: a sequel JMBRAS 60(1): 75–80.