Maragtas
Maragtas
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Maragtas

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Maragtas

The Maragtas is a work by Pedro Alcantara Monteclaro titled (in English translation) History of Panay from the first inhabitants and the Bornean immigrants, from which they descended, to the arrival of the Spaniards. The work is in mixed Hiligaynon and Kinaray-a languages in Iloilo in 1907. It is an original work based on written and oral sources available to the author.

Nonetheless, whether the work is purely fictional has been debated.

The Maragtas is an original work which purports to be based on written and oral sources of which no copy has survived. The author makes no claim that the work contains a transcription of particular pre-Hispanic documents. The work consists of a publisher's introduction by Salvador Laguda, a foreword by the author, six chapters, and an epilogue.

The first chapter describes the former customs, clothes, dialect, heredity, organization, etc. of the Aetas of Panay, with special mention of Marikudo, son of old Chief Polpulan; the second chapter begins a narrative of the ten Datus flight from Borneo and the tyranny of Rajah Makatunaw there, to the island of Panay. The datus bartered with a local Ati chieftain Marikudo for the plains and valleys of the island, offering gold in return. One datu, Paiburong, was given the territory of Irong-Irong, which is now the province of Iloilo in the Philippines; the third chapter tells of the romance of Sumakwel, Kapinangan and her lover Gurung-garung; the fourth chapter concludes the tale of the ten datus, telling about their political arrangements and their circumnavigation of the island; the fifth chapter describes language, commerce, clothing, customs, marriages, funerals, mourning habits, cockfighting, timekeeping techniques, calendars, and personal characteristics; the sixth and final chapter gives a list of Spanish officials between 1637 and 1808; the epilog contains a few eighteenth-century dates.

Philippine historians made little use of the Maragtas before the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, with references such as that by Josué Soncuya in his 1917 Historia Pre-Hispanica de Filipinas having been restricted to the Spanish-speaking elite. In a book published in 1984, the historian William Henry Scott wrote in reference to an interesting research related to Maragtas. Scott said that in 1947, a book co-authored by historian H. Otley Beyer, founder of the Anthropology Department of the University of the Philippines, refers to Margitas and "the ancient writing in which it was originally inscribed. Scott quoted Beyer stating: A remarkable document known as 'Margitas', dating probably from about 1225, was preserved in Panay and transliterated into romanized Visayan in early Spanish days." The myth that the Maragtas was not an original work but rather a transcription of earlier works was later given wider circulation by various academics, as detailed by Scott. Scott concludes that the Maragtas was an original work by Pedro Alcantara Monteclaro.

Other Philippine historians, however, have other opinions. Their research led to an interesting theory that some of the data in the Maragtas is verifiable in other sources.

In the year 2000, the Filipino anthropologist F. Landa Jocano, on his part wrote a quite different account about the findings of H. Otley Beyer. Jocano maintains that the manuscript that Beyer was referring to as "A remarkable document" was in fact the Maragtas, not the Margitas. According to Beyer, the original text of the Maragtas was written in old syllabary, although the document was preserved in Romanized Bisayan in early Spanish days. Beyer claimed that the Maragtas written in original syllabary "was brought to Spain in the early 19th century by a Spanish colonel, but it can no longer be traced". On the other hand, the American Anthropologist seemed also sure in his description of the text, and he described it as follows:

Another feature of the Panay manuscript, now called "Maragtas", is the ancient writing in which it was originally inscribed. The Bornean Visayans, used a form of syllabic writing, which they introduced wherever they spread. In this syllabary, the vowels were written only when they stood alone or at the beginning of words. Each consonant sign stood for the consonant followed by the sound of "a". The characters were incised on bamboo or written on bark with cuttlefish ink.

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