(10 April 2015) The prestige of a royal house in the Malay archipelago rested in no small part on claims of descent from illustrious ancestors. At the most deep-rooted level, myths of origin in Malay texts drew on beliefs of unity between the earth and sky, symbolised by the marriage between a prince who descended from heaven and a princess from the earth or water, who emerged from a mass of foam or a clump of bamboo (cf. Ras 1970: 81-99).
With the coming of Islam, into this chain of descent were introduced powerful figures from the Islamic pantheon, pre-eminently the great hero Iskandar Zulkarnain (Alexander the Great), as well as the first man, Adam, and the Raja of ‘Rum’, as the Ottoman lands were known in the east.
This beautifully illustrated story from the British Library is here.
