Malay Seals from the Islamic World of Southeast Asia: Content, Form, Context, Catalogue by Annabel Teh Gallop (review)

Malay Seals from the Islamic World of Southeast Asia: Content, Form, Context, Catalogue is a masterwork of a pathfinding scholar that stands in its own league. Annabel Teh Gallop, Head of Southeast Asia Section and Curator of Maritime Southeast Asia at the British Library, brings together 2,168 Malay seals from the Islamic world of Southeast Asia (present-day Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, Indonesia and southern parts of Thailand, Cambodia and the Philippines). This book is the first comprehensive reference book and book-length study focusing specifically on Malay seals. (One notable antecedent to this opus magnum is Gallop’s own 2002 PhD dissertation ‘Malay Seal Inscriptions: A Study in Islamic Epigraphy from Southeast Asia’ complemented by her exhaustive article publications.) The oldest seal entry is dated AH 1039 (AD 1629/30) and the most recent comes from AH 1399 (AD 1978/9). The book opens with an exquisitely detailed introduction on the content, form, and context of the Malay seals (pp. 1–52). It places the evolution of the Malay sigillographic tradition in a comparative historical context of trans-and intra-regional contacts and connections accompanied by select references to sealed manuscripts and seals themselves. The catalogue consists of twenty-seven chapters (pp. 52–722) with the first twenty-six chapters organized by region, and the final chapter presents 42 miscellaneous seals whose locations are either unspecified or specified yet entered the catalogue after the printing process began. The last section of the book showcases seven thematic indexes that aptly complement the rest of the book and respectively list matrices, impressions, personal names and titles, place names, dates, Qur’an quotations, and concordance of seal database numbers and catalogue numbers (pp. 739–785).

Gallop sets out to “make accessible a large body of primary source material from the Islamic world of Southeast Asia in the form of Malay seals” (vii). She delivers a premier collection of primary source material and a treasure trove of Southeast Asian perspectives. The book is gracefully designed and meticulously edited. She defines Malay seals as “seals from Southeast Asia or used by Southeast Asians, with inscriptions at least partially in the Arabic script” and its derivatives such as Jawi (vii). The main function of the seals was to identify the individual seal holder and his “social, political, and spiritual universe,” and the inscription on the seal presents “the image of self that the seal holder wished to project to the world” (p. 5). Therefore, the seals catalogued in the present volume are by nature highly “personal and official” (p. 5).

Gallop’s masterful reading and interpretation of the seals’ materiality, aesthetics and textual content unearths “layers of identity” (p. 2) that are richly diverse whilst showing remarkable consistency and cohesiveness, in itself a microcosm of Southeast Asia. To mention a few highlights (among myriads of others), we find a striking contrast in the ways seal holders’ titles display Islamic and pre-Islamic features. Of all Malay seals, 78 per cent of them are inscribed with titles and over a third of these are titles of sovereigns (p. 6). The most common sovereign title is the Arabic term sultan. It accounts for 77 per cent of the sovereign seals in the catalogue and attests to an overwhelming Arabic/Islamic influence on the institution of kingship (p. 9). Non-sovereign titles, in contrast, are “more reflective of ethnic and regional traditions” (p. 10). Notable examples from the Malay world include datuk, tengku, orang kaya, as well as Javanese noble tiles of ratu, radin, panembahan, and pangiran. Non-sovereign titles are also predominantly in Sanskrit terms (p. 10), such as raja, maharaja and bendahara, whose usage predated the introduction of Islam. Another pre-Islamic attribute of Malay seals and probably the most noticeable one is the frequent reference to Hindu-Buddhist cosmology in the form of the lotus-shaped decorative...