INTRODUCTION

West Java has always been known as an area with very sparse archaeological remains from the Hindu-Buddhist period, if compared to Central and East Java, although written sources – both inscriptions and manuscripts – state that in West Java there were once two kingdoms, known as Tarumanagara and Sunda. The Tarumanagara polity, known from the famous group of seven Sanskrit inscriptions dated paleographically to the fifth century CE appears to have still been in existence in the 660s, when two embassies were sent to China by a country named To Lo Mo (Duolomo) in Chinese sources. The fifth-century stone inscriptions repeatedly refer to the City of Taruma (Tarumanagara), to King Purnavarman, and to gods Vishnu and Indra.

After the seventh century, little is known about events in West Java, until a polity named Sunda is mentioned in the inscription of Rakyan Juru Pangambat (CE 932); it is written in Old Malay and refers to a king of Sunda ‘regaining his power’. There is therefore a distinct possibility, evoked long ago by Coedès and reasserted by Indonesian historians, that we have, in between the demise of Tarumanagara and the rise of Sunda, a period of domination by Srivijaya (if the CE 686 inscription of Kota Kapur mentioning a Malay expedition to bhumi Jawa is to be understood as referring to West Java, which is so far not proved). This kingdom of Sunda survived until the sixteenth century, when it succumbed to the newly dominant Islamic political powers.

The discovery in West Java in the 1980s of the large temple complex of Batujaya brought a considerable amount of new data to document the history of the first millennium CE in West Java, though it does not necessarily bring answers to the above historical questions (Fig. 5.1). The site is now in the middle of a large scale restoration programme and many research projects were carried out on and around the temples. The site is situated some 2 km away from the present-day course of the Tarum River (Citarum), but appears to have been traversed by a now extinct branch of this same river flowing north into the sea, now 4 km away.