[Gustav]

David, yes, indeed, there are birds on your Sunggingan. Thank you for the hint.

Attached are somewhat better pictures of the perhaps oldest provenanced Sunggingan, the other Vienna Keris, possibly first mentioned in 1607. It is in style very similar to the Sunggingan in Sendai (1622) and the Sunggingan from Skokloster in Sweden. The spontaneity of the painting is quite different from later Sunggingans. The thema of all these early Sunggingan is Alas-Alasan.

There is an interesting detail, an insect at the very top of the sheath, a dragonfly (?). An insect, mostly butterfly at this place is depicted also on some of the older modern Solo style Alas-Alasan Sunggingans (like the one on cover of Solyoms book), and, I see now, possibly also on David's Sunggingan.

The one possible explanation could be the Alas-Alasan as the cosmic model of the world and thus the insects (and birds) belonging to the heaven, the highest sphere.

"The vertical image is concerned with the universe. Fundamental is the inclusion of a protective elemant to faciliate contacts with the deities and the ancestors. Most basical is the bipartite upper world-lower world. The patterns consist of birds and flowering creepers - sky and earth. In FIGURE 11, the protective element is represented by the Chinese mythic dog-lion, ky'lin. (...) More complex is the abstracted tripartite world of water flowing down the mountains, forested land, and wings floating above in the sky (...)"

from "Five Centuries of Indonesian Textiles", the Mary Hunt Kahlenberg Collection, Prestel 2010.

Perhaps like ky'lin, the mythical kreature on this Sunggingan (similar to the three carriages with elephant head, eagle wings and lions body in Cirebon, dating back to the 16th cent. (1549)) has a protective function.