Aji Saka

Aji Saka leaves a kris with one follower with the order to surrender it to no one but himself, then sends another follower to fetch it. Each carries out the order he received, neither gives way, and both die. From this, in the telling, came the order of the Javanese letters: hana caraka, data sawala, padha jayanya, maga bathanga — there were envoys, they quarrelled, they were equally strong, both became corpses.

The letter order itself precedes the story. The Javanese script is Brahmi-derived and its recitation order is an order made to be memorised; the Aji Saka story is an explanation supplied later to a sequence of sounds that happens to read as a sentence. This entry states the order as the earlier of the two, because the reverse presentation leads readers to suppose the script was created by an event.

The name Aji Saka is linked to the Saka calendar, which comes from India and takes 78 CE as its epoch, and some tellings place his arrival in Java in that year. The link is one of names and not historical information: the Saka calendar entered Java together with the whole Indian repertoire in the first centuries CE, through trade and teaching, and not through one person's arrival.

The story is often used to state a beginning of civilisation in Java — before Aji Saka, in the telling, Java was held by man-eating giants. Origin accounts of this kind should be read as statements about what their tellers counted as civilisation, and not as a record of Java's condition before the first century, evidence of whose settlement is far older and of an entirely different character.