Hasan had just finished listening to the amazing story told to him by his mother, and could not stop thinking about it. This story, the story of Suhendra, was utterly fantastic, and he needed to share it with people! The next day, he went out to tell his friends about it, and while many had not heard it, many others had. And weirdly enough, the stories they had heard were slightly different, some including more adventures that Suhendra and Guntur went on, others changing the monsters they fought, still more having the Garden of the Gods be underwater, and one even had Suhendra as a woman!

Hasan was confused. How could such an amazing, famous story have so many different versions? He went home to his mother, the smartest woman in the world, to ask her.

"Well Hasan," she said, "this story is passed down verbally, from storyteller to storyteller. Things are bound to change over time - no one can just remember it perfectly. It makes sense that there would be different tellings!"

Hasan understood this, but did not like it. This man had gone on an amazing journey, and the only way he would live forever is if his name continued down throughout history! And if people could not even remember the major events of his life, what if they began to forget his name someday? Or stopped remembering his story altogether? This would not stand.

These thoughts cluttered Hasan's mind for a while after this, before he came up with his first solution - he would learn to travel the Kingdom, collecting every different version he could find, and creating from those one, final, definitive version of Suhendra's story. So, on the day after his 15th birthday, he took a midpas, some food and water, and a bow and some arrows, and set off around the Kingdom to track down the stories.

Over a decade passed, with Hasan travelling from village to village, city to city. He met storytellers, great chiefs, merchants from Ayamerah, and even one of the King's official entertainers, all on a journey to find commonalities, and discover the TRUE story of Suhendra. He heard many different tellings, and often found himself telling his version to the people he came across. He found that the promise of a good story often got him repayment in food, water, and shelter.

Finally, at over thirty years of age, Hasan felt like he had done it. He had woven together a tale of Suhendra quite like the one his mother had told him all those years ago, but with slight differences he found common across most tellings. He had it, the definitive version of the Epic of Suhendra, and it was all locked up in his mind.

In his mind...

Hasan thought about this. He had the definitive version, and he could spread it as far and wide as he could, but what guarantee could he have that this version would not itself be changed? After all, Suhendra himself told the original stories, and they had clearly changed from what was the real-life story. He needed to find a way to make his version permanent, and clearly that would not come from him living forever.

So he set out for another decade, this time visiting priests and priestesses across the Kingdom, and meeting with any of the court researchers that would speak to him, asking how they would pass down information. The majority simply passed down information through word of mouth, teaching others, and divine inspiration, all methods that were completely unhelpful for Hasan.

Eventually, he was ready to give up. Maybe man was not meant to keep information in a way not controlled by the Gods. He sat down, dejected, and did what so many of us do when upset - he stress ate. He ate so quickly, in fact, that he carved into the banana leaf he was eating off of with his nails.

Wow, he thought, that looks like the symbol for Utari...

Then he thought some more. That looks like the symbol for Utari...*

He jumped up, and ran over to the nearest person, pointing to his food-stained banana leaf. "You there, what does this mean?"

"Ummm..." the man pondered, confused, "that means Utari, right? The Goddess of divine inspiration?"

Hasan jumped up and down. "Yes, it does! And I didn't have to tell you what it meant, did I?"

"No, that's just the symbol for her. Everyone knows that. When you make that shape, it means Utari."

Hasan grabbed the man by the head, kissed his forehead, and ran off.

The following decade was spent in Kuching, surrounded by scholars and researchers employed by the King, who were all fascinated by the idea that Hasan had brought to light, and wished to help make it a reality. Eventually, a system of glyphs was created, standardized in size by the lines between the veins of the banana leaf, which could coherently transfer information through reading and writing between peoples of different generations. In this way, the Suhendran writing system was born.

Melaungkan is a system of glyphs discovered in the 18th century packed away in a cave on Doebi that appears to be a precursor to the written form of the Greater Suhendran language family. Numerous attempts at decipherment have been made, with varying levels of perceived success. Although some calendrical and what might prove to be genealogical information has been identified, none of these glyphs can actually be read as text. If Melaungkan does prove to be the precursor to Suhendran and proves to be an independent invention, it would validate the theory of Suhendran inspiration to be true, and confirm Suhendran to be one of very few independent inventions of writing in human history.

Two dozen wooden objects bearing Melaungkan inscriptions, some heavily weathered, burned, or otherwise damaged, were collected in the late 19th century and are now scattered in museums and private collections. None remain on Doebi. The objects are mostly tablets shaped from irregular pieces of wood, sometimes driftwood, but include a chieftain's staff, a bird-man statuette, and two kanu ornaments. There are also a few petroglyphs which may include short Melaungkan inscriptions.

Authentic Melaungkan texts are written in alternating directions, a system called reverse boustrophedon. In a third of the tablets, the lines of text are inscribed in shallow fluting carved into the wood. The glyphs themselves are outlines of human, animal, plant, artifact and geometric forms. Many of the human and animal figures have characteristic protuberances on each side of the head, possibly representing eyes.

. . . .

Melaungkan is the modern name for the inscriptions. In the Suhendran language it means "to recite, to shout, to chant out".

The original name—or perhaps description—of the script is said to have been garisan diukir untuk melaungkan, "lines carved for chanting out", shortened to untuk melaungkan or "lines [for] shouting out". There are also said to have been more specific names for the texts based on their topic. For example, the melaungkan tahun ("lines of years") were annals, the melaungkan ikan ("lines of fishes") were lists of persons killed in war (ikan "fish" was homophonous with or used figuratively for "war casualty"), and the buruan melaungkan "lines of fugitives" were lists of war refugees.

Much scholarly debate has emerged as to the purpose of these early melaungkan texts, and if they do prove to be a form of writing, then the question shifts to one of origin, and to why it was created in the first place. Many theories have been floated - one prevailing theory has the origins with the great disasters that oral tradition places at the site of Sarawak, and the ancient Oracle of Sarawak, believing these early glyphs to have been created to account for the disaster and record the dead, missing, and those who fled. Others believe them to be of religious significance, pointing to glyphs that appear to symbolize deities in the ancient Suhendran pantheon. Other still posit that they grew in use due to the rise of trade between the ancient Suhendran and Ayamerhan civilizations, citing the widespread use of the eventual Suhendric script and language family in the region. And one theory even believes the writing to be a facilitator tool for the storytelling within the civilization, pointing to the supposed dating of these tablets (2000 BCE) to be around the rise of the Suhendran theatrical movement (see *ancient Suhendran theatre).

. . . . .

Except for a few possible glyphs cut in stone (see petroglyphs), all surviving texts are inscribed in wood. Oral tradition holds that, because of the greater value of the wood, only expert scribes used it, while pupils wrote on banana leaves. Pelanite ethnologist Akur Hadid believed that carving on wood was a secondary development in the evolution of the script based on an earlier stage of incising banana leaves or the sheaths of the banana trunk with a bone stylus, and that the medium of leaves was retained not only for lessons but to plan and compose the texts of the wooden tablets. He found experimentally that the glyphs were quite visible on banana leaves due to the sap that emerged from the cuts and dried on the surface. However, when the leaves themselves dried they became brittle and would not have survived for long.

Hadid speculated that the banana leaf might even have served as a prototype for the tablets, with the fluted surface of the tablets an emulation of the veined structure of a leaf:

Practical experiments with the material available on [Doebi] have proved that the above-mentioned parts of the banana tree are not only an ideal writing material, but that in particular a direct correspondence exists between the height of the lines of writing and the distance between the veins on the leaves and stems of the banana tree. The classical inscriptions can be arranged in two groups according to the height of the lines (10–12 mm vs. 15 mm); this corresponds to the natural disposition of the veins on the banana stem (on average 10 mm in the lower part of a medium-sized tree) or on the banana leaf ([...] maximum 15mm).

 

— Hadid 1971:1169

Melaungkan glyphs were written in reverse boustrophedon, left to right and bottom to top. That is, the reader begins at the bottom left-hand corner of a tablet, reads a line from left to right, then rotates the tablet 180 degrees to continue on the next line. When reading one line, the lines above and below it would appear upside down, as can be seen in the image at left.

However, the writing continues onto the second side of a tablet at the point where it finishes off the first, so if the first side has an odd number of lines, the second will start at the upper left-hand corner, and the direction of writing shifts to top to bottom.

Larger tablets and staves may have been read without turning, if the reader were able to read upside-down.

. . . . .

According to oral tradition, scribes used obsidian flakes or small shark teeth to flute and polish the tablets and then to incise the glyphs. The glyphs are most commonly composed of deep smooth cuts, though superficial hair-line cuts are also found. Several researchers, including Hadid, believe that these superficial cuts were made by obsidian, and that the texts were carved in a two-stage process, first sketched with obsidian and then deepened and finished with a worn shark tooth. The remaining hair-line cuts were then either errors, design conventions, or decorative embellishments. Vertical strings of chevrons or lozenges, for example, are typically connected with hair-line cuts.

This lengthy process in the carving and creation of tablets is thought to be the reason for such a drastic change in form from ancient Melaungkan to modern Suhendran, if the origin theory is to be believed. As the area became more urbanized, populous, and literate, clearer and easier to write and carve scripts were needed to lower the barrier of entry for literacy and publication of information, from trade goods to stories to records of war dead. In this way, a more widely available written language formed, one far from the glyphs and symbols inherent of Melaungkan.