Calatagan Pot
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Discovered in Calatagan (Batangas), believed to be from the 11-15th centuries, and brought to the Philippine National Museum in 1961, the Calatagan Pot is one of the very few pieces of archaeological evidence of ancient writing in the islands known as the Philippines.
For decades, many tried to decipher the script’s meaning. Some even questioned the pot’s authenticity.
To find a possible translation, researchers were required to do a palaeographic analysis with known syllabic scripts.
Ancient Philippine writing did not use the kudlit (accent marker) and even sometimes dropped the last syllable, making deciphering very difficult, with many possible permutations of reading the script.
Ultimately, one researcher concluded that the language of the pot is in Visayan, as the ‘da’ symbol matched that found in other Visayan syllabaries. This theory offered the closest possible transliteration with lexical coherence.
Researchers followed through on the many possible decryptions transliterated into the Visayan language. This inscription reading offers “lexical coherence… historical emplotment… and sociological mapping”
Along with the skeleton buried next to the pot, it is believed to belong to an old diasporic (from Visayas to Luzon) Visayan bailana (woman prime priest) who died far from her home.
This means that the oldest Philippine inscription known today is a magical incantation read before rituals, and it is written in Visayan (with Old Malay & Javanese/ Balinese).
Read more about the pot’s possible meanings in: “Barang king banga: A Visayan language reading of the Calatagan pot inscription (CPI) ” by Ramon G. Guillermo and Myfel Joseph D. Paluga
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Calatagan Ritual Pot
The Calatagan ritual pot is an earthenware pot with thirty-nine syllabic inscriptions incised around its shoulder, representing one of the oldest surviving writing systems in the country. It has a restricted mouth, an everted rim, and an indentation at the center base.
This artifact was purchased from Feliciano Bugtong, a farmer who found it in Talisay, Calatagan, Batangas.
Scholars from different fields within and outside the Philippines have studied and provided varying transliteration and interpretation of the inscriptions. Dr. Rolando Borrinaga, who read the inscriptions in a counterclockwise manner, identified it as an outline of a three-stage monologue in old Visayan language for the precolonial babaylan’s (a shaman and usually female) pag-ulî (return) rite, suggesting the use of the vessel beyond its utilitarian function.
An earlier study of Dr. Quintin Oropilla derived the inscriptions from the Pangasinan language, with the texts being a sacrificial prayer. On the other hand, Dr. Ramon Guillermo and Myfel Joseph Paluga, through paleography, cryptography, and ethnohistorical analogy, proposed a Visayan origin of the pot and provided another reading of the Calatagan Pot, which suggested a Javanese influence on some of the scripts. Like Dr. Borrinaga and Dr. Oropilla, their interpretation resonated with the babaylan and precolonial ritual connections of the artifact.
This was declared a National Cultural Treasure in 2010. ( @museumxst0ries)
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