An Account of Some of the Oldest Malay MSS. now extant.
By the Rev. W. G. Shellabear.
By the courtesy of the librarians of the British Museum, the Bodleian library at Oxford, and the University library at Leiden, I was enabled in the summer of 1895 to make careful copies of some very old Malay manuscripts which are preserved in those libraries. As far as I have been able to discover, these mss. have never before been noticed in any scientific journal, and have never even been examined by anyone capable of understanding their historic and philological interest. This is the more remarkable in the case of those in the Bodleian library since it is probable that they are the oldest Malay mss. now extant, and are therefore of peculiar value to the student from their bearing upon the Malay language and literature.
I had also an opportunity of making a brief examination of six interesting Malay mss, which are the property of the Cambridge University library, but as these have been described at great length by Dr. S. van Ronkel in Part 2 of the 6th Series of Bijdragen tot de Taal- Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië, it is only necessary here to say that they were the property of a Dutch scholar, Erpenius, who died in 1624, and three of them appear from signatures to have belonged to a certain Pieter Willemsz. van Elbinck, who was at Acheen in 1604, went to the Eastern Archipelago again in 1611, and died in 1615 in London, two years after his return.
The manuscripts described in this paper consist of six letters, and a copy of the Hikayat Sri Rama, which is a Malay translation of the famous Ramayana. The letters are arranged, as nearly as can he ascertained, in chronological order, and at the end of the paper has been placed an extract from the Hikayat Sri Rama, sufficient to give a good idea of the spelling and of the diver-
