| Abstract: |
By the early ninth century A.D., when the Javanese began to preserve financial documents on permanent materials, a millennium of commercial contact with the Indian subcontinent had already had some impact upon the manner in which the Javanese quantified their world. Borrowings from the Indian repertoire were, however, very selective, and aside from certain chronological measures, more often limited to the appropriation of terms than of the units themselves. Recent archaeological finds (notably a number of gold bowls with their weight inscribed on their bases) have made possible the establishment of the metric equivalence of the key unit in the early Javanese system of weights - the kati - and its relation to the smaller units in the system. Given this information, it has been possible to work through a series of financial documents to establish the relative values of the main land measurement units, as well as those of a series of volume measures.
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