Dynastic History|Candi Gunung Wukir — Where the Kingdom's Record Begins

On a hill above the Progo valley, a few kilometres southeast of Muntilan, stands a stone platform with three smaller platforms set in front of it. In Śaka 654 — 732 CE — an inscription in Sanskrit, cut in Pallava script, was set up here to record the erection of a liṅga at a place the text calls Kunjarakunja, by order of a ruler named Sanjaya.

The stone tells his accession as his own court told it. The island of Yava, it says, rich in grain and in gold mines, had long been governed by Sanna; after Sanna's death the country fell into disunity; Sanjaya, son of Sanna's sister Sannaha, took the throne, and having subdued the neighbouring country ruled in quiet. That is a legitimacy claim written for the man it legitimates. It is also the oldest dated inscription from inland Java, and the point from which historians conventionally begin the kingdom later called Medang, or Mataram. Nothing in it says who quarried or carried the stone. The machinery of villages, dues and obligations appears only in the charters of Sanjaya's successors.

The inscription was found among the ruins in 1879 and is now held in the National Museum of Indonesia in Jakarta. The Central Java heritage office records what is left on the hill: a main temple with three perwara temples before it, a yoni in the main chamber whose liṅga is missing, a Nandi in the shrine facing it, and its own plain finding that these buildings cannot be re-erected, because the original stones have not been found. A sixteenth-century Sundanese chronicle, the Carita Parahyangan, also remembers Sanjaya; it was composed some eight hundred years after him.

📸 Cover: the main temple of Candi Gunung Wukir, base and rubble core only, Gunawan Kartapranata, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons