A cotton double-ikat textile, which dates to the 14ᵗʰ century CE and belongs to the renowned “geringsing” class, emerged from Lampung, the southernmost region of Sumatra island, western Indonesia. This textile, presently in the Department of Indo-Pacific Art at Yale University Art Gallery, displays “Hindu-Indonesian” iconography not previously seen in geringsing, executed with singular artistic and technical mastery.

The textile is a fragment, measuring 268 x 61 cm. It displays one original warp end, but appears to have been intentionally cut in the recent past at the other existing warp end, using a modern, sharp scissor tool.¹ This deliberate severance, along the vertical axis of a mandala-like geometric repeat, creates an harmonious appearance in the surviving remainder:  one end mirrors the other. The textile was probably divided in half for inheritance purposes (a very common fate among Lampung heirloom textiles).² If this conjecture is correct, the original uncut length approximated 5.3 meters. The surviving fragment is in good condition, suffering only from minor tears and abrasion along the selvedges;  like many historic textiles found in Lampung, it was preserved with evident care for centuries. Efforts to locate a missing part have been unsuccessful, and frustrated by ignorance of the specific findspot or village of origin.

Severed remnants of foreign yarn are visible at regular intervals along the entire length of one selvedge, indicating that another textile was formerly stitched to this geringsing with sewn thread. Analogous weavings from both Lampung and Bali suggest that the attached textile may have been another, identical geringsing.

The textile has undergone four radiocarbon dating processes at the Yale Analytical and Stable Isotope Center, compensating for southern and northern hemispheres (northern, to admit an Indian possibility for materials or manufacture), and “treated/untreated” [i.e. cleaned] with room-temperature adjustment.

All four results align closely in the 14ᵗʰ century, with an outer-limit range between 1292-1415 CE, and a probability around 95.4%, placing it among the oldest textiles currently known from southeast Asia.

The thread count is approximately 40 warps and 17 wefts per centimeter, consistently (compare Balinese geringsing, from the oldest extant, circa 18ᵗʰ century, through the 20ᵗʰ century:  about 17 warp and 11 weft threads/cm, consistently).

Pattern is primarily defined by warp threads, due to their greater density and more precise tie-dye. Weft threads occasionally betray misalignment with the warps, resulting in the random appearance of white-ish “dots” on an otherwise solid indigo ground. Warp threads appear to have been tied and dyed in bundles;  the smallest bundles consist of 8 or 9 yarns, yielding a maximum of 4.5 pattern variations per centimeter.¹

Dye and materials analysis [awaiting data; to be developed]. Swiss botanist Heinrich Zollinger [1847:126] reported that Lampung dyes were mainly extracted from mengkudu bark (Morinda citrifolia L.), secang heartwood (Caesalpinia sappan L.), “the shell of the mango and the fruit of a certain Grewia.” Reddish horizontal bars, virtually hidden in the center of the mandala, may be colored with cinnabar (vermilion) pigment.

Close comparison with Balinese geringsing wayang yields an obvious ‘family’ relationship – but more akin to a distant nephew than parent and child. Evaluated by every objective technical criterion – spinning, dyeing, weaving – the quality of this textile is superior to any extant geringsing Bali.

This article describes several alternative hypotheses for the purpose and place of manufacture of this textile, hereinafter called “geringsing Lampung”. We begin with a brief sketch of the political and economic situation of western Indonesia in the 14ᵗʰ century as well as the profound rôle played by textiles in pre-modern eras, followed by a discussion of the locations and contents of Indonesia’s primary repositories of early textiles (essentially, private homes in three regions), a short appraisal of the unique iconographic content and meaning of this textile, a glance at Old Sundanese literature, and lastly address the core questions of “where and why” geringsing Lampung was made.

Geringsing as a textile class was first revealed to the world at large by Dutch æsthete and autodidact W. O. J. Nieuwenkamp, who purchased two pieces in a Tabanan (Bali) palace in 1906, astonished by “the beautiful somber colors and austere ornamentation, which turned out to be woven not only with ikat weft threads, but also – and this was the most remarkable aspect of the find – with similarly treated warp threads. The existence of double-ikat fabrics was, after all, previously unknown in our East!” Nieuwenkamp then rode “at a full gallop” to a remote, almost inaccessible village, their sole place of manufacture at that time.¹ Geringsing subsequently acquired iconic status as the pinnacle of Indonesian weaving, due to the rarity and difficulty of the process, its extreme localization in a single village, the years required to complete a textile, and the magic power believed to envelop them. Textile researchers and broad Indonesian tradition both assert that all hitherto-known geringsing were woven in this one “sacred village” of Tenganan Pegeringsingan, southeast Bali;  and to our knowledge, all hitherto-known geringsing have emerged from traditional contexts in Bali or Lombok only, which suggests that geringsing have not been woven elsewhere for several hundred years. Many examples reside in public and private collections worldwide. The age of the oldest collection textiles probably does not exceed 300 years, and the great majority date from the 20ᵗʰ century.

Although we do not know where geringsing Lampung was woven, we doubt that it was manufactured in Tenganan Pegeringsingan.

“Western Indonesia” (in a broad cultural rather than modern-national sense) consists of territories that participated in international seaborne trade during the past 2500 years:  Sumatra, the Thai-Malay peninsula, Java, Bali, Lombok, coastal Borneo, and southwest Sulawesi. Indonesia’s pivotal location on the narrow ocean passages between two voracious markets, India and China, along with the products that Indonesia contributed to that trade, have defined the archipelago’s importance and generated its wealth throughout history. The larger trading zone stretched beyond India and China to the edges of the known world:  Japan and Korea, west Asia and east Africa, Europe. Ports in western Indonesia were places where sellers from India and the Middle East could meet buyers from China, facilitated by “the more or less predictable alteration of the monsoon wind system in the Indian Ocean, heavily influencing the movements of ships, sailors, passengers and commodities across the sea.”¹ With large and diverse seasonal populations, these ports were obligatory, hospitable layover stations to await favorable winds for return or ongoing voyages, and served as transshipment or redistribution hubs for regional and interisland commerce, predominantly in Javanese and Balinese rice and Indian textiles, but including premium products from the “Spice Islands” of eastern Indonesia (clove, mace/nutmeg), and also as consumers and vendors of e.g. precious metals from Sumatra, west Borneo, and Europe, Chinese coinage and ceramics, Arabian horses, slaves and bonded laborers, ship building and repair, metal tools, ivory and rhinoceros horn, kingfisher feathers and hornbill casques, forest products like sandalwood, honey, and wax, resins like damar (for caulking), or benzoin and camphor medicinals – and a coveted commodity, black pepper harvested in Lampung gardens.² Lampung’s prosperity and attendant textile richness flowed almost entirely from the fruit of this flowering vine.

Black pepper, Piper nigrum, was the most valuable article of mediæval and early modern trade until the 18ᵗʰ century. Dense and dry, it packed enormous value into small sacks, did not spoil, traveled flexibly, and essentially served as money, a measurable store of value. The primary uses, worldwide, were culinary and medicinal. An elite, uncommon aromatic, pepper lent pungency and savor to cooking in small amounts, and there were no local equivalents. If plenteous, it was consumed in much greater quantity than is typical today, as a signifier of wealth. It also disguised wintertime food rot. Most important, black pepper was an indispensable antidote in “humoral medicine”, the ancient Greco-Roman (and subsequently Arab/European) theory codified by Galen, that the body is governed by four humors (fluids):  blood, yellow bile (liver secretions associated with indigestion), black bile (vomit or stool, identified with concepts like melancholy), and phlegm (mucus). An exquisite balance of these humors was required for wholeness and health. Foods and drugs were believed to embody qualities like “hot/cold” and “dry/moist”, and treatment aimed to restore balance through diet, compounds (drugs), and (in some cultures) bleeding. Black pepper was “warm and drying” – thus therapeutic, e.g. “good for stomach problems”. China did not subscribe to humoral notions, but it was (and remains today) probably the largest consumer by far of black pepper, as an element of refined cuisine.

Western Indonesia afforded many sites for a trade entrepôt, good harbors with the potential to become city-states. A single monopoly port was the prevailing objective for much of the classical and early modern period:  domination rather than competition, a contest among petty rulers that led to near-constant warfare as they vied for pre-eminence and disrupted the conditions of stability, security, and hospitality that trade prefers. The most effective chokeholds for maritime traffic control were located on the Malacca and Sunda Straits, in coastal east Sumatra and west Malaya, but few of these harbors had access to agricultural hinterlands or sufficient farm labor, so rice topped the list of products conducted to these ports. Java and Bali produced the rice surpluses that enabled population density, and they enjoyed equally fine harbors, but their locations required detours and more complex navigational calculations. Indonesia’s pre-colonial states were very fragile. Populations were generally tiny, huge forested areas were almost entirely uninhabited, and a loose network of prickly, semi-autonomous lairds in widely separated communities, as well as palace elites, needed a precarious balance of regular rewards to ensure their loyalty, restraint on requests for their services and corvée labor, scant oversight or regulation. The daily necessity of rice became a vulnerability that rose in tandem with the success (keramaian) of many harbor-states:  able to support only small sedentary populations, but crowded with sailors and merchants, they outgrew supplies. To preserve a consensus, rulers relied ultimately on fear and military force, but soldiers too must be outfitted, fed, and paid.

The radiocarbon date range of geringsing Lampung, 1292 to 1415 CE, coincides with an era and a polity often extolled as the first iteration, and the exultant model, of Indonesian statehood:  the Hindu-Buddhist Rajasa dynasty that ruled the Singasari and Majapahit kingdoms from seats in east Java. Majapahit asserted an archipelago-wide hegemony which, although largely dependent on the willing collaboration of distant lands for mutual benefit, posited the relationship of a superior state (Java) to acquiescent subordinates (Nusantara, Jav. “the others”, i.e. the non-Javanese). Singasari under King Kertanegara (1268-1292) and Majapahit under Kertanegara’s descendants, culminating in Hayam Wuruk (1350-1389) and his imperial tactician Gajah Mada, made repeated efforts to bring Sumatran trading ports along the Malacca Strait under east Javanese control, but the Sunda kingdom in western Java, together with its Lampung dependencies, rich in pepper, on the southern shore of Sumatra, seems to have maintained an exceptional and proud independence, albeit surrounded by Java and its vassals.

Majapahit military ventures in Sumatra subdued Jambi and Batak lands in the early decades of the 14ᵗʰ century, chastened Melayu in 1339 for the temerity of sending an independent tribute mission to Yuan China, then conquered Melayu and Minangkabau in the 1340s. In 1358 a Sundanese royal marriage delegation that intended to unite the interests of west and east Java was instead massacred in the Majapahit capitol, a betrayal that cemented long-lingering Sundanese contempt for the Javanese. In 1377 Majapahit naval forces punished a Palembang gesture toward independence. Overall, however, east Sumatran polities in the 14ᵗʰ century convey a wary readiness to assert political independence and test the resolve of peers. Lurking on the edges of empire where control was weakest, they were periodically challenged and disciplined by Java, and occasionally and prudentially they acknowledged a tributary relationship with Java, but temptation to become the singular, dominant trade hub in the Malacca Strait never abated.¹

When Rome unraveled circa 5ᵗʰ century CE, longstanding Mediterranean networks fractured and the locus of west Asian trade, much reduced, drifted eastward toward the Black Sea (Trebizond), Anatolia, Tabriz and Baghdad, greater Persia. The sudden, dynamic consolidation of Islam in the 7ᵗʰ century filled a political void, while at the same moment an energetic, expansionist Tang dynasty spawned China’s “Golden Age”, with a population that grew, over 200 years of census data, from 50 to 80 million. Maritime (and caravan) trade resurged, as transformative Muslims quickly navigated the entire Indo-Pacific littoral from east Africa to China, a span of 10,000 kilometers, embedding Islamic infrastructure (e.g. mosques) and regulation (statutory pricing, mechanisms for borrowing, lending, handling dispute, default, or bankruptcy) in a chain of emporia that resembled modern global cities, “more dependent on each other and far away markets than on their immediate surroundings.”¹ By the 12ᵗʰ century, significant parts of the Asiatic and northeast African trading zone were under the political control or influence of this confident, cohesive Indo-Islamic civilization.  Muslims crewed ships, resided in every port (often in distinct settlements for foreigners²), and sometimes acquired high office even in Hindu-Buddhist and Confucian states. They constituted an increasingly pervasive mercantile network,³ which offered attractive facilities to co-religionists – benefits that eventually catalyzed a genuine cultural revolution in western Indonesia during the 15ᵗʰ and 16ᵗʰ centuries. The earliest Muslim-ruled footholds in Indonesia (e.g. Pasai, Aceh) were established during the late 13ᵗʰ and 14ᵗʰ centuries, mostly in backwater areas on the edges of the archipelago (places very much like, although probably not including, Lampung), far from major population centers or Hindu-Buddhist heartlands, but spreading persistently along the western coasts⁴ toward small far eastern islands where trade was highly concentrated, bypassing heathen interiors. Only upon confronting the ancient, agrarian, withdrawn civilization of the kejawen (Javanese-speaking peoples) was Islam compelled to accommodate, conceding a significant acceptance of Javanese philosophy and traditions, major and minor, in exchange for conversion.⁵ It is a familiar compromise in interior Java, both village and court, where people outwardly adopted Islam from political and economic expedience as much as conviction, but clung inwardly to many old Indic ways. This “revolution” was not a populist revolt;  it was led preemptively by elites themselves, who thereby preserved their power, entitlement, pageantry, and property.⁶ Meanwhile, the routines of the commoner and peasant persisted immemorially:  past was always present.⁷

Obscurity and a low profile may have sheltered Lampung from events which, in Java, erased many elements of the pre-Islamic cultural heritage. Features that survived on Java were those that did not overly rely upon court patronage, elaborate supply chains for materials, or specialized workshops. Books tended now to be written in Arabic script on paper, not Old Javanese and Balinese Indic scripts on dried leaves of palmyra trees (lontar). Wayang theater was a portable feast – renewed, popularized, freely shared by lineages of dalang (narrators/puppeteers), and adapted by them to Islam (but coexisting with celestial Batara Guru [Shiwa], the god par excellence, longing for his chthonic rice-goddess consort Shri [Uma]¹);  keris (ceremonial daggers) were reframed and reconsecrated as Islamic heirlooms:  theater and weaponry are male concerns, unlike weaving. Sartorial tastes also changed:  the upper body, previously naked and often tattooed, was now covered, requiring new garments and patterns. Traders flooded markets with attractive ready-to-wear, whereas handweave can take months to execute, is private and bespoke in nature, and difficult to monetize. More important, Islam nominally canceled (or replaced) Java’s feudal caste system, leading to the impoverishment of petty aristocrats and rent-seekers who wore sumptuary clothing, alongside the disappearance of pre-Islamic rituals that required particular, potently-patterned textiles. Courts moved, ecclesiastical communities were dismantled, clerical organization disappeared, support structures collapsed, armies of maintenance workers became unemployed, pilgrimage patterns changed. “In the wars of the 16ᵗʰ and 17ᵗʰ centuries in Central and East Java many families of rural gentlemen descending from Majapahit andèn [squires], lairds of manors, or from chiefs of (originally Shiwaite or Buddhist) religious domains may have been ruined… [T]hey sank to the state of unfree agriculturists, unless they availed themselves of an opportunity to flee the country, to try their fortunes elsewhere.”²

Lampung, in contrast, largely retained its feudal marga (clan) organization (even into the modern era¹), which offered convenient proxies through whom west Java overlords controlled and collected pepper harvests. Moreover, Islam seems to have penetrated Lampung in a more gradual, haphazard, desultory fashion, unlike the sweeping, conclusive, and probably violent victories of the Wali Sanga (“Nine Wali”, propagators of Islam) on Java. Between Banten’s seizure of Sunda kingdom ports on the Java Sea in 1526 and Sunda’s final collapse in 1579 when Demak (Banten’s overlord) seized west and central Java, non-consenting Sundanese Hindu elites may have sought refuge in Lampung (as their counterparts in east Java found safety first in Blambangan, a resilient Hindu enclave in the far east of the island, and finally on Bali), bringing with them their most precious heirloom possessions. Lampung enjoyed a reputation as a sanctuary for “dissatisfied fortune seekers and all kinds of riffraff”² because village autonomy and weak policing meant it was “given to brigandage”³ by “rebellious” (weerspannige) elements and not much surveilled.

Lampung’s political and spiritual alignment in the 14ᵗʰ century, prior to Islamic ascendance on Java, is unclear (notwithstanding the assertion of the Desawarnana of 1365, qv. below, that Lampung is a component of Melayu, which in turn “executes the orders and follows the commands” of Majapahit¹); but within 200 years the Lampung economy was controlled by the Banten sultanate.² As successor to the Hindu Sunda kingdom, Banten probably appropriated Sunda’s relationships with Lampung, and therefore Banten’s historically-documented governance of the late 16ᵗʰ through 18ᵗʰ centuries likely reflects main features of Sunda governance in the 14ᵗʰ (which is otherwise pure guesswork). The wealth of Sunda/Banten rested largely on pepper. Accordingly, since it’s founding in the 5ᵗʰ-8ᵗʰ century, Sunda had almost certainly garrisoned both sides of the Sunda Strait and patrolled its waters, in order to collect tolls, compel landings at supervised harbors, tax imports and exports, safeguard traders, warehouses, and marketplaces, sell pepper, suppress the scourge of piracy (a precondition of maritime trade), and dissuade fierce hinterland (e.g. Abung) populations from periodically plundering rich coasts.⁴ In 1515 Tomé Pires, a student of trade intricacies, contributed the most important early account of Lampung. Relating hearsay of Sekampung (his Çacampom), at the southeastern tip of Sumatra directly opposite Sunda, he writes that the “country is plenteous;  it has a paté [regent];  he trades in Sunda and in Java;  and this country’s trade with Sunda is large. They say that it is in sight of Sunda. This country has a great abundance of cotton;  it has a little gold;  it has plenty of honey, wax, pitch, rattans;  it has some pepper, and good they say;  it has plenty of rice, meat, fish, wines, fruit… This paté is a Cafre [kafir, heathen], and … it is certain that they are almost all heathen in the hinterland of Sumatra, and they are not subject to anyone. They cross to Java in three days in lancharas [Malay lancharan, swift rowing-and-sailing vessels], and … they go to Sunda in one day.” Tulang Bawang (Tulimbavam) is adjacent to the north and similar;  to the south, “between [Lampung] and Sunda is the sea;  and the Gujaratees used to come over this to Java … to take in cargoes of cloves, nutmeg, mace, and white sandalwood, cubeb, etc. … [I]t is deep and easily navigable and it always used to be navigated by the Gujaratees before Malacca collected their merchandise where they all gathered together;  and then the Gujaratees ceased making this voyage, although navigation with the monsoon was good, because they came in by Sunda and ran along the coast of [Java], … all with one wind.”⁵ Malacca had become the singular regional port-of-trade, an alluring target for Portuguese seeking another strategic node in their thalassocratic network of outposts and chokepoints en route to China – they captured the city in 1511, and remained there for 130 years.⁶

Agrarian interior Lampung in the 14ᵗʰ century was probably a politically equivocal frontier zone between Sumatran and Javan (both Sundanese and Majapahit) interests, having long since loosened ties to the Śrīvijaya/Melayu mandala, with its fluidly shifting center of power (Palembang-Jambi-Minangkabau-Singapura-Malacca).¹ Small-scale traders probably siphoned pepper to east and west coast ports, to evade Sundanese checkpoints and multiply profit. The Chinese record an independent mission from a Lampung Maharaja diraja (“Supreme King of Kings”) in 1376 that brought pepper as tribute,² and the Desawarnana mentions both Sunda and Lampung as separate, distinct polities.³ However, if Sunda everywhere encouraged (and Lampung chiefs coerced) the monoculture of pepper as a cash crop (prefiguring the Banten regime two centuries later), then the population confronted rice deficiency and an existential exchange, at Sundanese ports, of pepper for food. Maximized pepper production meant the neglect of other necessities traditionally supplied by village or household labor:  rice, clothing, tools, etc.⁴ To secure such items on Java, coinage played a dominant rôle, e.g. in tax collection, legal settlements, and fees for services;  but in most other parts of the archipelago, barter exchange prevailed as always.⁵ By making taxes and debts payable in pepper, Banten effectively compelled everyone to plant ‘money trees’, and in 1691, with backing from the V.O.C. (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, Dutch East India Company, the state-chartered multinational corporation with militarized quasi-governmental powers that operated in Indonesia for 200 years and co-prospered from a monopoly on Indian textile imports), Banten committed to minutely-detailed regulation what may have been for centuries the implicit understanding:  that every Lampung person shall plant 500 pepper vines, and that local headmen will collect, itemize, and ship the fruits to a Banten-administered port accompanied by the headman’s laissez-passer, a letter of transit (lest it be considered contraband), for which shipments Banten will pay a (low) fixed price. Compliance by headmen was rewarded with titles and luxury gifts,⁶ among them a copper charter (piagem), keris daggers with gold handles, and “a set of beautiful Javanese clothes, such as are commonly worn at court”.⁷ In the hierarchical, carefully graded societies of Lampung, these objects certified authority, they frequently embodied specific heritable privileges for which large sums had been paid, and consequently they were preserved with great care.⁸ Throughout western Indonesia, commerce (in concert with the transition from ethereal Hindu-Buddhism to a very material Islam) slowly altered the standard measure of status, from family and rank, to possessions.⁹

Most ancient (roughly, pre-1750) Indonesian textiles have emerged from three regions:  Lampung, the Sasak villages of interior Lombok, and the mountains of central Sulawesi. Indian export textiles, both cotton painted (chintz, sarasa, kalamkari, pintado, leluhur) and silk double-ikat (patola), survive from as early as the 13ᵗʰ century, and were treasured and preserved in all three places. While Indian pieces constitute the overwhelming majority (nearly 100%) of historic textiles in Sulawesi, in Lampung they are relatively rare beside many thousands of local, ‘Indonesian’ textiles. (Lombok mirrors the Lampung framework, but in much smaller numbers.) In short, Lampung emerges as the premier (albeit non-institutional) repository and “Alexandrian library” of historic Indonesian material.¹ Moreover, the greatest part of that material appears to be, and by local account is, of Lampung manufacture and origin:  tampan, tapis, bidak, kumbut, lampit, palepai, etc.

The prominence of the Lampung repository is particularly striking because in the reckoning of most chroniclers of Indonesia, Lampung is marginalia, with no memorable accomplishment or historic rôle. It’s adjacency to Palembang and western Java is occasionally noted, usually as pawn to a Sumatran or Javan ruler, or as a guardian of the Sunda Strait (the “alternative gateway” to/from the Indian Ocean, employed particularly when irresistible monsoon currents swept ships west of Aceh Head at the northern tip of Sumatra, or when political instability in east Sumatra/Malaya led to dacoity and deserted ports in the Malacca Strait – or simply to bypass one rapacious power in preference for another, better paying¹). The last significant polity in Lampung may have been a precursor of Śrīvijaya, located in an estuary in the 5ᵗʰ-6ᵗʰ century:  Tarumanegara (“Land/Realm of Indigo”)², To-lang po-hwang (Tulang Bawang?), Kan-t’o-li/Gantuoli (Kalianda?). Subsequently Lampung seems to have been a loose composition of semi-autonomous villages, each with its own history and customs, but often collaborating in aligned pursuits like curtailing the presumption of an overlord, irawan (headhunting), or high-status brides. Ancient data about Lampung is scant, probably because it was unlike east Sumatra, in near-constant turmoil as Malacca Strait states contended to attract and control traffic;  the Sunda Strait presents a single chokepoint and supported one major polity only, so it was mostly uncontested and unremarked.³ Our ‘picture’ of Lampung in the 14ᵗʰ century is shaped by a large accumulation of small details, suggestions, tangential events in other, but analogous, places and times, no one of which is dispositive but which together assemble a probable, conglomerate impression. Until the overwhelming logic of a single dominant entrepôt port arose, Lampung’s diffuse decentralized notion of power had been the broad default for the entire archipelago, where great distances and the multitude of islands, peoples, and languages did not naturally promote unity;  and hence any claim to “empire” or a superior/subordinate relationship (suzerainty) was an exceptional projection of influence, an event that commanded regional attention. Śrīvijaya itself almost certainly took more the form of a confederacy of the like-minded, than a state with regular administration of subject regions. Similarly, at a much later date, Banten manipulated Lampung headmen with bribes and emoluments, not military might (apart from a joint punitive expedition with the V.O.C. in 1682, to regulate pepper supplies and discourage “smuggling”, i.e. exporting from an unsupervised port);  the chiefs, in turn, disciplined their populations and collected the products that Banten required.

In startling contrast to the genuine peculiarity of the huge Lampung historical textile repository – a conscious, long-term conservation undertaken nowhere else in Indonesia – the apparent total absence of historical textiles in nearby Java is virtually inexplicable.¹ Sumatran populations are often stereotyped as dynamic opportunists, quick to embrace the new, in contrast to tradition-bound rural Javans, resistant to change and clinging to the past. At any moment in history, Java’s population was at least 15 times larger than that of Lampung. Java is the cultural heartland of Indonesia since the late 1ˢᵗ millennium CE, and probably much earlier²;  it is the locus of concentrated archipelagic wealth. An analogue may exist in literature:  the Pararaton (“The Monarchs”), one of only two “insider” chronicles of Majapahit’s royal dynasty, written in Middle Javanese, exists in many Balinese copies, but no single copy of Javanese provenance;  the other, more precious chronicle, the Old Javanese poem Desawarnana (“Description of the Districts”, also known as the Nāgarakṛtāgama, “Treatise on the Realms”) of 1365 CE, survives in three Balinese copies only – together, signs that the Javanese no longer valued these texts.³ In short, wittingly or not, Javans have thoroughly relinquished large parts of their pre-Islamic material legacy.⁴

For culture generally, the Majapahit fusion of Indic political, social, and cultural values with Indonesia’s own underlying animism, folk tradition, and mysticism has proven indelible. A distinctive visual style of figural and ornamental depiction arose (i.a. on 12ᵗʰ-14ᵗʰ century east Javanese temple façades:  Panataran, Jago, Surowono, etc.) that was broadly embraced beyond Majapahit’s borders, for example in Lampung woven tampan (many extant pieces date to at least the 15ᵗʰ century).¹ It is the style depicted in both geringsing Lampung and modern geringsing wayang Bali, and it persists in Indonesian painting and theater to the present day despite seismic cultural change.

Nebulous questions thus arise:  are Javanese textiles incorporated in the Lampung or Lombok “repositories” (probably); and if so, can we distinguish them separately (probably not).

An associated barrier is the complete absence of textiles dating to the 1ˢᵗ and early 2ⁿᵈ millennia CE, despite reference in contemporaneous royal charters to their immense number, great variety, and prominence as trade items, consumer goods, and prestige gifts.² During most of the 20ᵗʰ century, an assumption prevailed that Indonesian textiles could not survive for more than a century or so, due to the hot, humid climate. A cascade of recent discovery and research has pushed the dated textile horizon back to the 13ᵗʰ century, and may yet delve deeper into the past. Textiles from the 7ᵗʰ-10ᵗʰ century would be particularly revealing, because that was the singular period of unsurpassed achievement in more durable art forms (monumental architecture, sculpture, jewelry, etc.). While it is feasible that 800 years represents a real survival barrier for Indonesian textiles,³ and earlier pieces are indeed exceedingly rare in many regions worldwide (virtually non-existent within equatorial cultures), this 700-year-old geringsing Lampung is in good condition and shows no sign of imminent self-destruction – an unambiguous indication that it enjoyed heirloom (pusaka) protection for centuries, probably as tangible proof of an owner’s ancestral power, prestige, and patronage. More likely, there are other explanations for scarcity or total absence on Java, probably within the implications of the “cultural revolutions” that overtook western Indonesia at several places and moments after the 14ᵗʰ century, or the cataclysm (e.g. a pyroclastic flow) that caused the interior central Java state of Mataram to abruptly remove to the east Java coast in the early 10ᵗʰ century, only to return to an interior home in the 16ᵗʰ in order to distance itself from incendiary coastal frenzy. Although the range of heirloom objects stored in the lofts of Lampung houses was almost unlimited, from weaponry and gongs to porcelain and copper plate charters from the ruler, weavings were the particular province of women, and meticulously preserved in enormous numbers (many thousands in the aggregate). Within family heirloom collections inspected by the author in the 1970s, damaged textiles were very few. This geringsing Lampung may have been removed from storage and exposed to scrutiny but once in a woman’s lifetime, and then restored to its place of secret honor until inherited by her daughters.⁴

Characteristics shared by both Lampung and Lombok reflect influences absorbed from external cultures – influences that obviously shaped their iconographies, although they each developed a distinctive local flavor. Their locations, on opposite peripheries of Java, tend to suggest a Javan umbilical;  but the broader continuities are Indic, most notably with iconography seen in distant Buddhist countries (Laos, the Shan states of Myanmar’s Chinese borderlands). Lampung and Lombok share many visual correspondences (tampan-osap, bidak-sokong, etc). If we discovered truly identical textiles in both places, we might reasonably suspect that those pieces were made elsewhere (Java?) and thence scattered to the outlying fringes of the realm. But the reality is otherwise:  though similar, these “complementary” genres are never the same. Lombok textiles are unequivocally and distinctively from Lombok, and Lampung products are likewise unmistakably Lampung. This suggests that Lampung and Lombok textiles are true products of their respective, individual locales, as the indigenes themselves believe.

However, for select items, Lampung, Lombok, and other regions may also have been targets of region-specific professional manufacturing schemes, similar to the chintz products of India that were narrowly designed for specific markets (Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, Bactria and central Asia, Red Sea, etc.). Some (many?) of the most refined textiles (e.g. tampan pasisir, bidak, tapis) may have been produced in workshops – mingling today with village products, and difficult to distinguish.

Another characteristic shared by Lampung, Bali, Lombok, and many other Indonesian cultures is the desire and need to copy certain textile patterns precisely. If experience teaches that heat, humidity, pests, and usage do inevitably cause organic materials to deteriorate, then it follows that traditions are preserved more successfully by copying than by physical conservation. Many of these textiles were accessories in rituals, and deemed to perform specific (e.g. apotropaic, protective, transformational, magical) functions.¹ The spiritual power and efficacy of a textile depend entirely on its purity and fidelity to established form. Weavers do not necessarily require an exegetical framework, a profound intellectual understanding of design content or imagery;  it is the doing itself, the ancient repetition and production, that matters. To achieve a successful copy, weavers require either a formula (adequate for some geometric patterns) or a template, an existing textile. For example, there are specific lineages of tampan that seem identified with particular Lampung villages, families, and houses, which were copied repeatedly² – whether woven by local women, in a professional workshop, or by a specialized commune is impossible to determine. Thus too geringsing Bali are extraordinarily consistent over their approximately 300 years of extant textile history:  the patterns and the thread counts do not change, and the artisanship, the mastery of technique, shows only slight degradation.

But degradation there is, subtle yet discernible. A virtually constant characteristic of historic Indonesian textiles is that the oldest pieces are the best pieces, in any category, from every standpoint:  materials, craft, confident articulation of pattern, the lyricism that constitutes art. These earliest glimpses of traditions represent apparent peaks in quality, and yet may actually be midpoints in a timeline of unknown age but long standing, which is highly developed, practiced and polished, when we first see it – and perhaps already in decline (because the arc of quality thereafter invariably curves downward, as comprehension of the original intention fades and weaver-copyists begin to replicate misunderstandings or errors). In short, this 14ᵗʰ century geringsing Lampung may not be the “best-ever”, but simply the best-extant, and it is tantalizing to ponder what an earlier, 12ᵗʰ (or Xᵗʰ) century geringsing might look like.

An attractive alternative hypothesis is that these ‘earliest’ textiles were born in an artisanal context (a workshop) as fully-designed art objects, which did not undergo a gradual elaboration by multiple successive handweavers, or dreamy invention by a village visionary, but rather burst into the marketplace ab initio as mature, fully-formed, complex conceptions – an exceptional luxury product targeted at elite clientele enjoying sumptuary privileges, and/or purpose-built for an intended usage. Apart from the occasional unique textile “fit for a king”, such costly atelier products would be susceptible to minor adjustment for the sake of variety but generally reproducible and duplicable, and thus a steady source of income. This hypothesis aligns with a general Indonesian cultural preference for continuity and consistency. Because such ‘designer’ textiles might debut at any moment, we cannot determine at what point in their timeline we first glimpse them, but we see that they were thereafter produced, and they sustained commercial workshops, for centuries. We may infer that if they display distinct imagery narrowly belonging to the 13ᵗʰ and 14ᵗʰ centuries, then they were designed at that time and not earlier. It may be that there are no 12ᵗʰ (or Xᵗʰ) century progenitors of geringsing Lampung because none exist – or they bore discarded, out-of-fashion imagery. It may be that this geringsing Lampung was woven at, or very shortly after, the moment the genre was introduced.

Many features of this textile set it apart from all other members of the geringsing class of cotton double ikats.

The technical achievement is dazzling – superior in every respect to geringsing Bali. The yarns are finely spun;  ikat tie-and-dye is razor-sharp;  there is little or none of the bleeding reddish outline that characterizes virtually all geringsing Bali;  the thread count is more than double that of Bali in the warp, lending much sharper focus;  patterning is spacious, graceful, and curvilinear;  texture is lighter weight, more delicate.

The iconographic “narrative” is unidentified, and not displayed in extant geringsing Bali. Speculations range widely. Those not tethered to east Javanese temple sculpture relate mainly to recent (19ᵗʰ century or later) wayang puppetry or Balinese painted imagery. All assume that we are looking at a dramatized ‘scene’ from an Indic narrative, in which a human or divinity of ambiguous gender, seated or enthroned in a classic posture of royal ease, interacts animatedly with a kneeling non-human creature who offers a sembah (hands clasped in an obeisant gesture of respect and submission), in the onlooking presence of another human, and a smaller attendant or companion.¹ All characters wear crowns or unusual headgear, a prominent jeweled necklace, and waistcloths that display geringsing-like designs. Most of these conjectures seem feasible, but in their specificity, all are mutually incompatible. (Our own low-confidence conjecture is that it displays a scene from the Ramayana.) The original propagator – the ‘artist’, for lack of a real genealogy – certainly intended to depict a particular event, but in the absence of clarifying context or evidence, we may never discover what it was.²

In sum, geringsing Lampung – woven near to the time that geringsing wayang patterns with Majapahit conventions were first imagined and produced – reveals a much more refined conception and execution of geringsing than any extant example from Bali.

Sri Ajnyana is a poem committed to written form circa early 16ᵗʰ century, but bearing hallmarks of oral tradition. It describes the journey and spiritual rebirth of an ascetic, burdened by past sins, through a mandala-like group of five heavens, four at the cardinal quarters surrounding a “golden house” in the center, located in high mountains amid ravishing natural beauty:

Radiant like the morning star,
beaming like phosphorescent mushrooms,
like the moon shining brightly,
like lightning bringing rain,
sparkling like fireflies,
like arrows being discharged,
like sunlight after daybreak,
like dew reflecting sunlight,
like flickering luminous centipedes,
thus glittering and twinkling,
enchanting like seeing the mountains,
charming like sailing a lake,
nostalgic for not seeing the ocean,
such was seeing the golden house …
My heart was filled with longing,
my tears flowed abundantly,
while I ascended …
I found Puah Aci Kuning,
seated on a mattress,
dressed in a geringsing wayang skirt [satapih giringsing wayang],
with a girdle of gula manikem fabric,
a scarf of Chinese red fabric,
a cord of Indian red fabric,
a waistband of white silk … [sajajanur lungsir putih]
    [Adapted from Noorduyn & Teeuw 2006:229-230]

The poet embeds geringsing in the highest heaven, enveloped in superlatives, companioned by precious imports, and worn by the presiding goddess, a celestial who bestows “ultimate illumination”.¹

I ascended to the bedroom, …
Its bed-curtains were of light red laka fabric,
flowered manjeti blankets applied with gold leaf,
in the centre a limar cloth,
dark blue covered with gold leaf [wulung ditu(m)pal parada],
Pahat mats were spread out, fragrant with silk fringes,
pillows spread with gold, …
a geringsing cloth on the sleeping place [giringsing di pagulingan],
and many cloths on the rack,
beautiful variegated cloths,
sacred cloths all of them. [op. cit. 234]

Sacred cloths all, and geringsing safeguards the sleeper. Textile forms of geringsing wayang were known in pre-Islamic Sunda, highly valued, doubtless sumptuary, and occupied a symbolic position, probably religio-magical, readily apprehended by the poet’s audience.

The 15ᵗʰ century poem Bujangga Manik is a detailed record of a young prince’s travels, in ships and on foot, throughout Sunda, Java, and Bali, with an excursion to Melayu in Sumatra, visiting religious schools and hermitages. He is a pilgrim longing for “supreme sense” (rasa wisésa), but pausing often to admire the view and converse with ship captains or his mother. At length he founds and perfects an ascetic community on a sacred Sunda mountain. His labors done, he lays down to die (achieve moksha, liberation), and is then honored in a glorious heavenly abode.

His travels begin in the Sunda Strait, passing Sangiang island “halfway to Nusa Lampung”, and like many travelers he is struck by Rakata [Krakatau] to the west, “a mountain in the middle of the sea”. The crew is multinational:  Bangka, Lampung, Jambi, Bali, Malayu, Makassar, Pasai, China. Arriving safely in Bali, he gifts a textile (kaén) to the captain in gratitude. A misanthrope who cannot abide the “continuous noise” almost everywhere he goes (Bali is shockingly “crowded”:  “there were so many of them, / both men and women. / I had thought there would not be, / but behold, on the contrary, / many more than [among] Javanese people, / much more crowded than in Malayu. / I did not stay there long …”),  he seeks “absolute loneliness and aloofness”. He speaks, reads, and translates Javanese, an apparently rare and desirable attribute in a partner, but he is terrified of temptation;  when a princess offers to “give myself, / dive like a hawk, / leap like a tiger, / to be [your] sweetheart”, Bujangga Manik grabs his walking stick and resumes his roaming.¹

Old Sundanese poetry indicates that Sunda was thoroughly “localized-Indic” in religious outlook, at least among the elite – the people who concern us – but the extent to which Sunda might have influenced Lampung in spiritual matters is unknown, and perhaps unknowable. Bujangga Manik is well aware of worlds beyond the archipelago (India and China), but neither of these poets mention Islam or Muslims, even though it is virtually impossible that Manik would not encounter them during his travels. His adventures may be authorial inventions, but they indicate that foreign realms like Java and Bali were common destinations (with routine sailings in merchant vessels that also accommodate tourists), while the Sunda Strait was a common departure point. The literary language has no admixture of terms derived from Arabic. These poets seem to live in a cultural bubble that will soon burst, with Banten’s seizure of Sunda ports in 1526 (surely a manifest gathering storm). The nobility’s detachment from terrestrial concerns may have contributed to Sunda’s demise, but it is equally clear that these refined philosophes, true literati, would never renounce the deep beliefs they express with such grace. They died, dissembled, or fled.

We know of no pre-Islamic “classical” literature from Lampung itself.

The place of manufacture is purely conjectural. Raw materials and finished textiles circulated throughout (and beyond) western Indonesia in almost every direction. Spinning, weaving, patterning, even dyeing, often stemmed from separate locales (or countries), creating a compound provenance. We can only assess the possibilities.

Overall, the differences between geringsing from Lampung and Bali are so stark and provocative that they appear to represent distinct ‘species’ or traditions. Moreover, as noted, the surpassing standard of the Lampung product indicates specialized, professional manufacture, possibly in a ritualistic environment similar to the village enterprise of Tenganan Pegeringsingan, or alternatively in commercial establishments such as those that produced patola in Gujarat, chintz in Andhra Pradesh, songket for central Javanese courts in Gresik, or batik in northcoast Java. As many as four professional weavers (acadar) were members of communities large and small in both Java and Bali by the late 1ˢᵗ millennium CE, while vendors of finely-spun cotton yarns attended the rotating village markets, and dye processors constituted as many as two-thirds of village semi-professional workers whose products were taxed.¹ Larger-scale commercial manufactories might have existed anywhere in the Indian Ocean littoral. We refer to these as ‘offshore’ facilities, which we envision as generally organized on industrial models such as India later employed. Natives of every Asian trading nation were spreading their know-how and exploiting their international connections. An hypothetical professionally-managed offshore manufactory located in the Java Sea (e.g. Banten or Riau) would bring production closer to consumers, cut costs, enjoy some independence from seasonal winds, and adjust rapidly to fickle regional tastes.² Its “impersonal” products would mitigate the lurking menace of spiritual possession by empowered village apparel, handwoven in an intimate context amid offerings, prayers, and esoteric rituals. However, some manufacturing processes were so specialized and technically challenging that they were probably not portable, e.g. the silk double-ikats of Gujarat (patola), which in their most refined examples display a perfectionism akin to that of geringsing Lampung. Accordingly, an Indian origin for geringsing Lampung (and, indeed, for Komering weft ikats, see below) cannot be excluded;  Indians demonstrated over centuries their sensitivity and adaptability to the particular tastes of different foreign markets, and they had thoroughly mastered this challenging weaving technique. If double-ikat in Indonesia was an import, then India was surely the shipper.

By all accounts India supplied a regular and broad river of luxury textiles to Indonesia – items that could not be matched locally. The narrative themes of geringsing Lampung are probably of Indian origin, as are many of the visual conventions (posture, behavior). The high quality of craftsmanship is consistent with other Indian weavings, and replication or imitation of foreign (here, west Indonesian “Majapahit”) visual mannerisms is characteristic of sophisticated Indian marketing strategy. Outfitting the entire archipelago with its imported product, India was uniquely positioned to define and shape visual taste, and to promote everywhere the Majapahit zeitgeist, the ‘common thread’. However, the only antique Indian double-ikats in cotton known to us are simple geometries (telia rumal), and the only 14ᵗʰ century textiles found in Indonesia that can be attributed confidently to India are a very few Gujarati chintz¹ and (possibly) patola² – genres that occasionally employ geringsing-like motives. If geringsing Lampung was manufactured in India, it would be unique within the current corpus of evidence.

The similarity of some Indian patola patterns and Indonesian geringsing patterns, as well as the use of double-ikat technique, cannot be coincidental, but the direction of influence, the identity of parent and child, is unclear. Furthermore, the technique (double-ikat) and the patterning (geringsing) may have different roots. A possibility that Indonesia invented both concepts, and that India then produced and marketed refined versions in silk, cannot be dismissed, but lacks support. There is however circumstantial evidence for Indian origins. Indians traded in southeast Asia since at least the 1ˢᵗ millennium BCE if not earlier¹;  there is no evidence that Indonesians contributed textiles to that transoceanic trade, although from the earliest times Indonesian ships, some very large, were plying the trade sea lanes.² Huge numbers of Indian textiles were brought from India to Indonesia throughout history;  there is little evidence that Indonesian textiles were traded to India, although they were influential in Thailand and Champa, and Indian merchants must have taken striking Indonesian cloths home as exemplars of Indonesian fashion and preference, to provoke commercial adaptation/exploitation.

Hints of India point specifically at Tenganan. A foreign ‘otherness’ is associated with the commune, and countless features set it distinctly apart, in the eyes of both Balinese and researchers, while strict self-imposed boundaries curb interaction with, and the influence of, outsiders – limitations which in former days isolated the village from its surroundings. Real property is owned communally, which prevents acquisition or infiltration by strangers;  they do not recognize caste or the authority of Balinese Hindu pedanda (priests) or the power of their toja tirta (holy water);  according to Controleur Schwartz, possibly the first European to memorialize a visit, their language differs from Balinese.¹ “Citizens” are deemed equals, both men and women;  decision-making is consensual, by a kerama désa (village council) composed of all married people whose offspring have not yet married (children replace their parents when they themselves marry).² DNA evidence indicates that around 10% of Tenganan’s population share rare genetic markers with Indians from Odisha [Orissa] and Andhra Pradesh.³ The given name of Tenganan’s legendary female founder is “Keling”, of the “wong Paneges” (Paneges clan), i.e. an Indian from ancient Kalinga, east-coastal India, but probably subsuming anyone from south Asia, including Tamils and Gujaratis.⁴ Tenganan has a seaward (not mountain) focus;  the people do not cremate their dead, but bury them naked, belly down, with head toward the sea;  their founding legends speak of a catastrophic oceanic landfall during which hundreds drowned;  they preserve and celebrate ancient relics associated with ships and rafts,⁵ e.g. a festival that commemorates ancestors who arrived from overseas with a boat-shaped offering and a song.⁶ Batara Indra is the Creator (Batara Shiwa elsewhere in Bali);  Indra made “shadows in the sky so that they could be copied as patterns in the [geringsing] cloths.”⁷ Tenganan is closely identified with the 11ᵗʰ century politician and priest Mpu Kuturan, who arrived from Java circa 1000 CE, possibly with the wong Paneges among his retinue;  a different legend holds that Rishi [sage] Markandeya, an immortal figure from the Bhagavata Purana, migrated Tenganan (and other primordial Bali Aga villages) from ‘désa Aga’, at the foot of Mount Raung on the eastern tip of Java, sometime between misty prehistory and the 8ᵗʰ century CE. Wayang puppet theater, the closest visual relative of depictions in geringsing Lampung, is unknown and not performed in Tenganan. In contrast to other regions of Bali, Tengananese “do not use geringsing fragments to heal the diseases of men and animals;  instead they use fragments of Indian double ikat which are woven of silk and called patola.”⁸ The most notable distinction of Tenganan is that its citizens do no menial physical labor, apart from vinting palm wine (men) and weaving geringsing (women);  they are forbidden to work the sawah (rice fields) or even to acquire daily necessities at market. They are the ‘chosen ones’, the pure ritual center of a subordinated mandala (sacred ring) that supports them⁹ (mostly tenants, who farm Tenganan’s large and profitable rice fields, as well as residents demoted due to misconduct). People with blemishes – physical or behavioral – are simply cast out, to fend for themselves in the forest;  they “disappear after a time and are never heard of again.”¹⁰ The daily activity of Tenganan’s core population consists almost entirely of ritual observance and enactment, “the correctly dramatised and staged performance of the rites themselves, the right doing at the right place and the right time.”¹¹ With single-minded purity and equilibrium, Tengananese make Bali’s world go around.

If Tenganan commune did arrive substantially as a group, by sea from elsewhere, then it is certain that they brought double-ikat geringsing with them, because geringsing is otherwise a stranger in Bali.

Specialized ritual villages similar to Tenganan may once have been scattered throughout Hindu-Buddhist Indonesia. The Desawarnana describes Hayam Wuruk’s visit to the mandala community of Sagara, high in the mountains of east Java, where “skillful” women presented their cloths to the king, who reciprocated with coinage.¹ Pigeaud states that these mandala communities enjoyed political independence within the realm, underscoring their exceptional character² and resembling Java’s isolated (and still present) Tengger and Badui communities, as well as Tenganan itself.³ The Desawarnana lists hundreds of ecclesiastical domains (privileged communes), which served esoteric, economic, and political interests;  Hayam Wuruk’s mother established a Buddhist domain in Lampung at Mount Sulang Lemah, “Faint Plume”.⁴ Fra Zoetmulder cites numerous Javanese literary references to “gringsing” (mostly apparel – sabuk sashes, sinjang waistcloths, lancingan leggings – bearing names like asabuk Kresnayana, lobheng, sabukira kawung, alancingan Udayana, Smarantaka, asinjang Krsnayana, etc.) beginning in the earliest surviving (11ᵗʰ century) chronicles;  Malay texts mention them even more frequently, through the 18ᵗʰ century. The variety and sheer volume of types imply constant demand and widespread (or widely available) production.⁵

Geringsing Lampung contains a section of missing weft (or “unwoven warp”), about 9 millimeters wide, at the finished warp end, which cannot be woven because continuous warp yarns stretch tightly against loom shed rods or aprons, creating “loom waste” (thrum). Sardjono and Buckley noticed the same “feature” at the warp ends of two 13ᵗʰ-15ᵗʰ century wax-resist textiles, found in Sulawesi and Lampung, the decoration of which they cautiously attribute to Java and deem early (at present, the earliest) exemplars of “batik”, supported by residues of wax discovered under a microscope.¹ Sardjono and Buckley propose that this missing weft “feature, originally for a purely practical purpose, marking saree lengths for the convenience of Indian clients, was gradually transformed into a mark of authenticity and prestige in an Indonesian context”, to account for what they imply is an ongoing, superfluous presence indicative of (unique to?) Indian export yardage.² They believe that “the cotton cloth [of the Sulawesi textile] was woven in India and then exported to Java, where the batik decoration was applied” using wax resist on one or both (indistinguishable) sides.²

In geringsing Lampung, the inherent fragility of fabric with no weft seems to have stressed the unwoven warps to such extent that very few remain.

The practical purpose, if any, of missing weft in a double-ikat is unclear, but if missing weft is stipulated to be an attribute of Indian weaving¹, then perforce geringsing Lampung was entirely made in India, because unlike batik, double ikat is decorated (tie-dyed) first, then lastly woven.

Lampung is also a credible manufacture locale for geringsing Lampung. As noted, almost all bespoke textile types acquired in Lampung are found only in Lampung, often in ubiquitous and large numbers, accompanied by looms and family lore, which together testify that they were not woven elsewhere. In 1988, the year of her death, Jakarta savante Paramita Abdurachman wrote that “in the South Lampung area, inhabited by the Abung clan of the mountains, there are locally woven textiles, with patola motifs. A very antique and rare weaving of double ikat in cotton shows a definite patola design which must have been worn at ceremonial functions.”[our emphases] After noting the occurrence of cotton double-ikat in India (telia rumal) and its likely ancient manufacture in “different areas of the Deccan”, Abdurachman states that “cotton double ikats were known in the Majapahit Empire, and that there were a group of weavers who made them for the court. Thus no wonder that the Abung knew how to weave cotton double ikats.”¹ Her conclusions may be supposition, but Abdurachman herewith announced the existence of an old cotton double-ikat cloth with patola affinities residing in a traditional Lampung context,² so Abdurachman may have seen or learned about the present geringsing Lampung.³

While geringsing Lampung is represented by just one example, about a dozen weft ikats (bidak) of comparable (14ᵗʰ-17ᵗʰ century) age are known, almost all from the Komering River area that straddles Lampung’s modern political boundary with South Sumatra (Palembang) Province, but lies within Lampung’s linguistic affine. They bear geringsing-like or geringsing-affiliated designs that cover the entire textile.

Patterned with singular precision and, in the oldest examples, a sensibility and palette strikingly similar to geringsing Lampung, these weft-faced ikats bear the same marks of professional work, but here at a staggering level of complexity and quality, unmatched elsewhere in Indonesia. Total thread count exceeds that of geringsing Lampung:  approximately 38 cotton weft and 30 silk warp threads per centimeter (versus 17 and 40, all cotton, in warp-faced geringsing Lampung). More consequential, the wefts are tie-dyed in pairs, to create a maximum of 19 pattern variations per centimeter, which conveys an impression of minutely detailed fineness (compare geringsing Lampung, with 4 or 5 pattern variations per centimeter), and permits a semblance of curvilinear line that defies and overcomes the rigid geometric grid of warp and weft. The combination of cotton weft with silk warp is peculiar,¹ whereas the luxurious broad bands of golden thread at the warp ends of complete pieces appear, like the pallav of Indian sāṛīs that they resemble, exotically and expensively foreign.² Despite their continuous geometric organization, small animate figures (anthropomorphs, birds, quadrupeds) seem to emerge from the predominate abstraction like secret chimera, with no apparent interrelationships and random orientations (sideways, upside-down).

Most Komering weft ikats are placed in musea:
• by Mary Hunt Kahlenberg (Los Angeles County Museum of Art [Kahlenberg & Barnes 2010:48-51] Inv. 80238, ¹⁴C date range: 1403-1501, 98%)
• by Robert Holmgren (National Gallery of Australia [NGA], details:  IRN28050 [two bidak sewn together], IRN27930, IRN27931, IRN27932; and Yale University Art Gallery [YUAG] 2017.48.14 [¹⁴C date range: 1443-1498, 91%], ILE2019.12.135 [¹⁴C date range: 1658-1684, 24%], ILE2019.12.136 [¹⁴C date range: 1648-1681, 37%])
• by unknown (Museum Volkenkunde, Leiden:  7082-BL-23-2, also here; formerly Museum Nusantara, Delft, S 6247-2, accessioned in 1962 and attributed without further clarification to “Bali”¹)
• by Thomas Murray (the Lloyd Cotsen Textile Traces Study Collection, Textile Museum, Washington D.C., Accession Number: T-1259, ¹⁴C date range: 1293-1400)
One is published:
• by Thomas Murray [2022:165-166]: No. 16035 [fig. 2.85] (¹⁴C date range: 1643-1672, 47%)

A unique fragment, consisting of two identical weft ikats sewn together along the selvedge, intimates that these bidak may have been garments, assembled from two identical or complementary pieces like geringsing lubeng in Bali (qv. below) or dodot in central Java. Two of the Holmgren textiles enumerated above, NGA IRN27931 and YUAG 2017.48.14, are an identical pair; remnants of severed thread along one selvedge indicate that they were once sewn together, double-width. As noted, geringsing Lampung also displays severed thread remnants on one selvedge, suggesting that formerly it too bore an attached, identical geringsing, à la Bali. We do not know when or why these presumptive ‘pairs’ were separated/detached; division for inheritance or for discrete sale are possibilities.

All of these bidak evolve from a single, common source design, displaying only minor variations (mostly of emphasis and palette), notwithstanding production over three or four centuries. The newest examples are nearly as sophisticated as the oldest, and in an environment that rewarded extremely polished weaving, it is possible that workshops competed by offering slight innovations on the common theme. Although the term “geringsing” is almost universally recognized today as cotton double-ikat, it had a more general and mystical meaning in old Java, as a reticulated pattern akin to snakeskin, embodying protective or curative power² – a definition that may embrace Komering ikats.³ The Textile Museum (TM) example yields a radiocarbon date range, 1293-1400, nearly identical to geringsing Lampung (1292-1415), which intimates that the prototype of these weft ikats is pre-Islamic. They may have persisted into the Islamic era because, unlike geringsing Lampung, they are overtly iconoclastic yet maintain an undisguised visual continuity with iconic predecessors – and because the manifold associations of geringsing in popular culture never diminished.

Villagers in the upper Komering River (Komering Ulu) preserved many other exquisite old waistcloths and funerary shrouds (bidak, e.g. YUAG 2017.48.13, YUAG 2017.48.16), in addition to these weft ikats with continuous pattern. This localized concentration of fine old textiles suggests the possible nearby presence of a workshop, or perhaps a village traditionally tasked with textile production, similar to Tenganan Pegeringsingan in Bali.¹ Without doubt Komering was an exceptionally wealthy, cultivated district of Lampung.²

Du Bois, the first European to hazard an extended account of Lampung culture based on close personal observation (circa 1822, enlarged in 1829)¹, summarized the fashion preferences of the districts and offered pertinent observations:

In the company of young daughters, … [fathers] must appear properly dressed,² mainly in “sien jang dodot”, called bidak or tjaka by the [Lampungers], made of either Lampung or Javanese fabric. The women wear sarongs (tapi) made of Lampung fabric over their bosom;  they are either cotton or silk, and usually stitched with Chinese gold thread or silk of different colors and sewn with sequins and very thin mirror or colored glass… They cost from one to fifteen rupees, rarely more, unless they are stitched or woven with European gold thread… Men rarely wear sarongs made of Lampung fabric other than those striped in the Javanese, Buginese, or other foreign styles. Most are imported from Java and Palembang;  it is only in the vicinity of Toelang Bawang that I have seen men’s sarongs woven by Lampung women.³

“sien jang dodot” = sinjang dodot.  Sinjang, like dodot, is a man’s wrap-around waistcloth (often double-width), locally called bidak. Du Bois distinguishes this male formal apparel (“either Lampung or Javanese”) from men’s sarongs (usually tubular), and suggests that both articles are commonly “foreign”, hence commodities. He describes a ubiquitous Abung female tapis type bearing (European!) gold thread, sequins, glass, and mirrors – then startlingly labels it a commercial item also (perhaps referring to the cost of applied materials). He localizes native handweave for men to the Tulang Bawang (Abung) area of Lampung, only – a detail of possible relevance, if Abdurachman’s conclusions about home-woven cotton double-ikat in an Abung context have merit.

Division for inheritance implies that an object like geringsing Lampung was unique (i.e. could not be replaced, duplicated, or equalled);  that it was neither communal nor temple property, but rather personal;  and because it was a token of status and hereditary prerogative granted to a forebear, it was “shared” or subdivided by descendants/successors – practical considerations that fetishize heirlooms and rhyme with Indonesia’s primordial worship of ancestors and founders.¹ A textile of 5-meter length is unlikely to have been sartorial, and too delicate to be a fluttering banner (a common sight at old Lampung celebrations and in remote Buddhist lands, e.g. northern Burma [Myanmar]). It may have been a curtain that demarcated a spiritually-elevated space, for example the precinct of a rank-raising (naik pepadun) ceremony or an aristocratic wedding² or, perhaps originally, the walls of a Hindu temple. In the Desawarnana of 1365 CE, geringsing denotes a “gold painted” fabric from which the curtains or canopy of the royal carriage compartment are fashioned, “gringsing lobheng lwih laka pada tinulis ing mas kajangnyan rinenga”.³ “Lobheng” (lubeng) is the powerful mandala diagram of the cosmos, the imago mundi, seen in geringsing Lampung. In Balinese geringsing lubeng, it is surrounded by smaller, simpler star-like patterns on a dark ground – shown on the hip cloths worn by geringsing Lampung figures. It is the pattern that enjoys the highest prestige among Tenganan people.

Ramseyer, who studied Tenganan from 1972 to 1974, reports that geringsing wayang kebo and geringsing wayang putri, two (of three) designs that display figures like wayang theater and most closely resemble geringsing Lampung, were seldom worn in Tenganan, but extremely desirable in external aristocratic circles, and thus likely to have been commissioned – e.g. as tooth-filing pillows, funeral shrouds, coronation garb, or curtains for sedan chairs carrying images of the gods.¹

Java, west or east, is also a credible manufacturing locale for geringsing Lampung, and for “Komering” weft ikat (east Java, specifically, is a provenance widely favored on first sight by cognoscenti, due to the seeming imprimatur of Majapahit). Expensive regalia that Sunda bestowed on Lampung notables was likely commissioned, in quantity, by the state. The kakawin (Hindu-Javan) and kidung (Islamic) literature of Java and Bali mention geringsing Pandawa-jaya (“Victorious Pandawa”) and geringsing Ramayana textile types (presumably pictorial, and usually identified, somewhat puzzlingly, as alancingan, “trousers” in modern Javanese but in the 14ᵗʰ century more likely a length of untailored waist- or loin-cloth¹). As noted, temples (candi) of the 13ᵗʰ and 14ᵗʰ centuries in the Brantas region of east Java display sculpted figures (humans, divinities, demons) with appearance and paraphernalia similar to the depictions in geringsing Lampung, and this iconography defined, in painting, theater, and culture writ large, the sartorial styles and specific depictions of personalities from classical literature that persist to the present day;  but unlike geringsing Lampung, the patterns of Komering weft ikats are not found in any 13ᵗʰ-14ᵗʰ century medium on Java, or (to our knowledge) anywhere else.² Indeed, to discover patterns (or a disposition) like Komering weft ikat in other media, we are drawn distantly back, to cast metal objects from southeast Asia’s Bronze and Iron Ages. Komering weft ikat may originate in a much earlier place and time;  it may be a very old, deeply resonant remnant that endured, and a predecessor that contributed to the geringsing Lampung sensibility. Alternatively, because surviving examples are surely and exclusively professional, Komering ikat may have been consciously designed for broad, rather than narrowly “Hindu”, appeal. We anticipate the future moment when an Indonesian Hōryū-ji of 7ᵗʰ century textiles is unearthed, answering many questions.

Bali is less likely to be the place of manufacture. As noted, geringsing Bali display very persistent designs, replicated with almost unvarying fidelity generation after generation, from the oldest extant examples to the newest. Most patterns are well-established, and exist in multiple examples (an unknown number of patterns have been abandoned, like the geringsing wayang mesila pattern with cross-legged figures, probably sustained until the 19ᵗʰ century, but no longer known by name in Tenganan¹). Of the three extant geringsing wayang patterns historically produced in Bali, geringsing wayang kebo bears the closest resemblance to geringsing Lampung.

The repeated “scene” shows three figures wearing geringsing lubeng waistcloths. The central and probably dominant figure wears a large turban;  he is sometimes described as a priest (Mpu Kuturan?) with acolytes, or a guru with one confronting student who offers a sembah and another behind who wears odd headgear or perhaps a mask. Production of geringsing in Tenganan was itself a ritualized process, from the auspicious day chosen to begin, through months and years of arduous, consciously inefficient processes (e.g. repeatedly overdyeing indigo with morinda red to achieve black) that “symbolically sabotage the possibility of mass production and banal commodification”, thereby engaging in a subtle Luddite resistance and copy-right by a tiny minority (twelve women in 2025, most over the age of 50) at a fraught juncture in Tenganan history.² Usage of finished weavings is also ritual, and does not deviate from the “rites of passage” model of other Indonesian traditional societies:  as vehicles and blessings at transitional moments in the life-cycle (birth, tooth-filing³, marriage, death), as refined ceremonial garb, symbolic protection during mock war dances, etc.

Within the Balinese repertoire, there is no trace of geringsing Lampung features (e.g. thread count, narrative pattern, size). If geringsing Lampung was ever made by Balinese, they would be unlikely to abandon such a distinctive, markedly superior iteration. Continuity matters, and Bali was impacted but not disoriented by the profound Islamic cultural upheavals that irreversibly altered other parts of Indonesia after the 14ᵗʰ century.¹

The strongest argument for Balinese provenance is that textile relatives do exist, however distant. In Lampung and Java, there are no known descendants. In Lampung and Java, every textile genre has multiple members – there are no “one-offs”. The singularity of geringsing Lampung may be attributed to many factors, but the winnowing effect of time, the loss of contemporaneous and comparative material, is the most compelling explanation. In the current (partial, uneven) corpus of ¹⁴C data (from different labs using disparate reference materials), among arguably Indonesia-made textiles, geringsing Lampung is perhaps the earliest, with only three or four potential peers:  the Komering weft ikat (bidak) fragment at the Textile Museum, Washington (contemporaneous);  the Lampung “batik” at Art Gallery of South Australia (slightly later);  one or two warp ikats from central Sulawesi at National Gallery of Australia, Yale University Art Gallery, or Los Angeles County Museum of Art (more likely 15ᵗʰ century).

Most (all?) major Lampung textile traditions are now extinct, or nearly so. When we speak of “Lampung textiles”, it is past tense. Likewise, winter is coming to Bali. Tenganan is often described in an idealized ethnographical “continuous present”, but in the early 1970s only two old women still wove geringsing¹;  it was revitalized with the encouragement of foreigners, in part under the umbrella of income-producing activity.² Globalization and tourism have irreversibly infiltrated the existence of Tenganan, as have the demands of modern statehood, to educate, conscript, tax, control. In their private lives, Tengananese have motorbikes, electricity, television, mobile phones. Youngsters have glimpsed an alternative “modern” life, and are ambivalent about Tenganan’s many constraints.³ Korn, whose research dates to 1926 (barely 20 years after the forceful imposition of Dutch power in southeast Bali and the attendant rupture of culture), wrote that while damaged or imperfect geringsing were ritually worthless to the village, they were much in demand elsewhere and sold off – although, Korn notes, “in point of fact, the Tengananese women prefer not to sell their products, and if they do sell them it is as a favour to the buyer.”⁴

A badly-damaged geringsing fragment, evidenced by a single snapshot, is reportedly owned by a Balinese temple.¹

This is the only textile known to us that substantially resembles geringsing Lampung in apparent age and quality. A temple official sent the snapshot to a Tenganan weaver, to inquire whether she could reproduce the textile;  the weaver replied that the task was “too difficult”. An informant reports a different photograph of this textile, mounted on a temple wall during a rarely-performed ceremony. To our knowledge, the temple textile itself has not been available for direct, scholarly inspection, and if deemed sacred, may never be accessible by non-Balinese.

While the style and execution are similar, the iconography differs entirely from that of geringsing Lampung, indicating that multiple geringsing wayang “scenes” or lineages circulated in mediæval western Indonesia.

As in geringsing Lampung, the intent must be to depict a specific incident from the canon of familiar Hindu-Buddhist or folk literature. One hypothesis:  a bhuta (demonic ogre-soldier) is reporting to Ravana, who is surrounded by his wives – an episode depicted several times at Candi Panataran.¹

It is noteworthy that despite the core educational intent of temple reliefs, wayang theater, or painting, and unlike geringsing Lampung, geringsing wayang Bali are not considered narrative or “story-telling”. Tenganan weavers do not identify the characters or event depicted in geringsing wayang because they do not know and may never have known (knowing was not their job, and commentators since Nieuwenkamp have conspicuously reduced this fundamental identification to an “authority figure”, a teacher or priest, lecturing two acolytes). For centuries, Tenganan weavers have prolonged their traditions only by exact replication. Consequently, a 20ᵗʰ century geringsing wayang kebo at Yale University Art Gallery shares identical pattern with a carbon dated, 1640-1800 example at Musée d’ethnographie de Neuchâtel (MEN 83.1.45), possibly the oldest institutional geringsing from Bali. In contrast to historical Tenganan weavers, the geringsing Lampung artist(s) clearly understood their subject matter;  their creation is as lively and engagingly expressive as a temple façade because it embodies a sophisticated comprehension of the captured moment, and (necessarily) the before and after, the context of the story. One or two of the “characters” seem to appear in both geringsing Lampung and this temple geringsing. We may be viewing two different scenes from the same epic or, indeed, two detached members of a complete “theatrical” set of weavings – a lost art form.¹

Note that two ancient textiles loosely identified with Bali are, or appear to be, similar to textiles attributed to Lampung:  this temple geringsing, and the “Komering” weft ikat in Museum Volkenkunde, Leiden. They may bear on our “umbilical” proposition that identical textiles found on opposite peripheries suggest a central origin:  Java, the heartland.

Lampung/Palembang origin:
The geringsing was found in Lampung.
The great majority of textiles found in Lampung are deemed to have been woven in Lampung.
Subdivision for inheritance is a Lampung trait.
Excellent condition indicates careful heirloom (pusaka) preservation.
Lampung textile art adopted many features of the Majapahit “wayang” style.
The closest extant, nearly contemporaneous textile relatives of geringsing Lampung are localized in Lampung’s northern Komering area.

Javanese origin:
Geringsing Lampung reflects the artistic conventions and mannerisms of Majapahit art, which pervaded Indonesia in the 14ᵗʰ century.
Professional weaving ateliers fulfilled aristocratic and official commissions.
Gifted by Sunda (or Majapahit via Palembang) to a Lampung notable?
Entered Lampung during a Majapahit military campaign in south Sumatra?
Accompanied aristocratic Sundanese refugees to Lampung?
The textile almost certainly entered Lampung before, or during, the collapse of Pajajaran in 1579.

Indian (or “offshore factory”/import-substitution) origin:
Probable inventor of double-ikat.
Source of iconography and core ideas.
Massive professional textile manufacturer/trader/exporter.
Skillfully adapts appearance to narrow local tastes, while also shaping tastes.
Indian artisans in every port.

Balinese origin:
Geringsing Bali reflect the æsthetics, but not the iconography or quality, of geringsing Lampung.
Tenganan Pegeringsingan is the sole producer of geringsing in modern Indonesia.
Comparable textile fragment reported to be in a Balinese temple, in distressed condition.

At the time of this writing, much remains conjectural or unknown.

Geringsing Lampung belongs to a distinct, very early lineage of the geringsing class, of which it is the only known representative so far. We see no evidence that this lineage was pursued in Bali. Qualitatively, geringsing Lampung is the finest example of the geringsing class currently known.

The 14ᵗʰ century and Majapahit’s “Golden Age” were a culmination. Western Indonesia had already been, for at least a thousand years, a pivotal participant in the vast multi-ethnic trading network that stretched from east Africa and the Mediterranean to Japan and the Pacific, probably hosting more international traffic (Indonesian vessels, in large part) than any other segment of this network. Strategic command of the Sunda Strait exposed Lampung to constant cosmopolitan influence, and tied it closely to the Sunda kingdom.

Lampung people took exceptionally good care of their heritage textiles. Available evidence does not determine where geringsing Lampung was woven, but we conclude with moderate confidence that it was stored, in Lampung, as a valuable heirloom (pusaka), from an early date, probably when it was new – i.e. from the 14ᵗʰ century onward. The overall condition of the geringsing is similar to that of bidak Komering made at the same time or soon thereafter, and stored with similar, provident care.

The documented, coercive administrative and commodity-extraction system applied by Banten to Lampung during the 16ᵗʰ-18ᵗʰ centuries was a long-established pattern inherited from Sunda and is generally applicable to the 14ᵗʰ century. If the textile entered Lampung from elsewhere as a gift, a purchase, or a token of rank or entitlement, then the donor was probably either the Sunda kingdom, or Palembang (on its own or as an agent of Majapahit).

We do not know the identity of the owner, but this object represents a cultural validation or ‘truth’ similar to the sacred paraphernalia vested with ancient rulers:  something rightfully and worthily possessed.

Wherever it was manufactured, the artistry conforms with that of the east Javanese Majapahit kingdom, a style widely embraced in western Indonesia.

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