Skip to main content
Ref ID: 19049
Ref Type: Book (Edited)
Editors: Perret, Daniel
Guillot, Claude
Kalus, Ludvik
Papin, Philippe
Salmon, Claudine
Leider, Jacques
Lorrillard, Michel
Griffiths, Arlo
Soutif, Dominique
Esteve, Julia
Skilling, Peter
Sidomulyo, Hadi
Frasch, Tilman
Htin, Kyaw Minn
Buchmann, Marek
Bauer, Christian
Nastiti, Titi Surti
Orlina, Roderick
Title: Writing for Eternity: A survey of epigraphy in Southeast Asia
Date: 2018
Place of Publication: Paris
Publisher: École française d'Extrême-Orient
Language: English and French
Abstract: This book provides a general survey of epigraphy in Southeast Asia. Epigraphy is an academic discipline for the scientific study of all kinds of inscriptions on durable media. Despite the fact that interest in inscriptional materials goes back more than two centuries in Southeast Asia, until now the field had never been the subject of a panorama, an introduction, or a general discussion. Thomas Stamford Raffles was the first in Southeast Asia, precisely in 1815, to emphasise the importance of inscriptions for linguistics, the study of religions and history in general. Until the middle of the second millennium CE, apart from a number of religious and literary texts, inscriptions in fact constituted unique local written sources providing detailed, accurate, and often well dated historical data for many aspects of ancient life in Southeast Asia. The concept underlining this volume is that of corpus, a set of documents brought together according to various criteria. In the field of epigraphy, these corpora are crucial tools informing multiple fields of analysis for historians. This volume gathers together eighteen contributions by renowned scholars of Southeast Asian epigraphy and history whose essays are focused on corpora of inscriptional materials written using Indian scripts and local variants, Chinese script, or Arabic script and local variants. Other corpora are discussed in the introduction to this volume, in order to try to provide the fullest possible overview.
Identifier: ISBN 978-2-85539-150-2
Editors: Perret, Daniel
Volume: 30
Series Title: Études thématiques