Hello all,
Sorry for chiming in late. I believe that Alan's initial response sums it up quite nicely:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Alan
If we say "better", my immediate question is "better in what way"?
What we know is that gold is most certainly the very best and most highly regarded material to adorn a blade, and it is the material of choice to calm the disturbing or evil influences that may inhabit a blade.
If suasa is preferred over gold as a material for dress purposes, my own feeling would be that those who say or indicate they prefer it are making a virtue of necessity.
In the culture of Jawa , gold holds a place above all else as a material of honour. Historically rulers used to give gold in huge quantities to buy support.
Within Javanese society gold has historically been used as the measure of all value:- a debt of currency will be expressed as a weight of gold, and you repay the gold weight extressed as currency when you repay the debt. This has been the case for a very long time.
Gold is firmly fixed in the Javanese mind as the only thing of true worth --- even my own daughter-in-law will not wear any jewellery unless it is gold. I know people whom I consider to be relatively poor who will save every spare rupiah until they have sufficient to buy some gold, and along the way, they will refuse to wear costume jewellery, because if they can't wear gold, they will wear nothing.
If Javanese royalty preferred suasa to gold, I feel that perhaps a few stories may have been invented to justify that preference.
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It is beyond doubt that gold was the major store of wealth and status throughout all of the SEA archipelago from ancient times on (maybe except for very remote cultures); cultures with own gold deposits had an edge... Also the female part of the population, from all accounts that I know of, relied on gold jewellery to independently store wealth (if possible at all).
However, I'm with Maurice that Rumphius' account certainly needs to be taken into account since it is one of the few very early *and* extensive sources and actually quite similar to the important Chinese reports.
Note that he also mentions gold keris hilts filled with resin in an earlier passage. When talking about suasa, he first mentions two other ethnic groups: "Therefore the Malays and Makassarese like to use suasa for keris and their weapons, for luck in war" - obviously this is specifically addressing weapons and not general storage of wealth. I'm not sure wether Rumphius' concept of "Malays" includes Aceh and possibly even Palembang. However, it should be noted that together with these 2 additional spheres of influence, peninsular Malay and Bugis/Gowa weapons are among those which do exhibit suasa decoration most often (and of course, there are many royal/state pieces which are clad in high-carat gold as well)... So there may be some truth to this account.
When he goes on to discuss Jawa, he also first focuses on weapons: "the Javanese can produce suasa in thin sheets, and use it to mount their keris sheaths" - with very few surviving examples and likely non-random sampling from that period this may be difficult to verify (pieces remaining inside the Javanese cultures had to be redressed at least several times and this will be done according to the latest fads wiping out any earlier preferences).
Only his statement "The Javanese esteem suasa more highly than gold, and their emperor, the Susuhunan, wears it more than gold." seems to run against what we believe to know. I still need to check wether the original context was possibly meant to be restricted to weapons rather than a general comment; since he also mentioned gold keris hilts, I don't think we are forced to decide between 2 different takes on history here...
Regards,
Kai