AFTER 50 years of enigma, the text inscribed around the shoulder of the Calatagan Pot, the country’s oldest cultural artifact with pre-Hispanic writing, may have been deciphered as written in the old Bisayan language.

Diggers discovered the pot in an archeological site in Calatagan, Batangas, in 1958. They sold it for P6 to a certain Alfredo Evangelista.

Later, the Anthropological Foundation of the Philippines purchased the find and donated it in 1961 to the National Museum, where it is displayed to this day.

The pot, measuring 12 centimeters high and 20.2 cm at its widest and weighing 872 grams, is considered one of the Philippines’ most valuable cultural and anthropological artifacts. It has been dated back to the 14th and 16th centuries.

Sometime in the early 1960s, the National Museum sought help from sculptor Guillermo Tolentino, the National Artist who produced the University of the Philippines (UP) Oblation, in deciphering the inscription on the pot. He was known for his fascination with the ancient Tagalog “baybayin” (alphabet).

However, Tolentino’s output was set aside on scientific grounds. It was allegedly achieved through seance—he supposedly invoked the spirit of the ancient pot maker and asked him for the meaning of the inscription.

According to Tolentino’s translation, the pot was an offering of a son or daughter to a dead mother.

Through the decades, other scholars had tried to decipher the inscription. Among them were Juan Francisco, Jean-Paul Potet, Antoon Postma, Harold Conklin and Johannes de Casparis, known experts in the field of paleography.

But no one was able to produce a transliteration, whether complete or partial.

Only Francisco (in 1973) and Potet (in 1983) had come up with more or less complete symbol equivalence. But they failed to determine the actual language.

Previous attempts at transcription faced three seemingly insurmountable problems:

* Equivalents of many symbols are unknown.

* Language used is unknown, although the possibility of Tagalog or Mangyan had been proposed.

* Even if the symbols are successfully identified, it is difficult to determine the start and end of words, as well as the final consonants of certain words.

Early this year [2008], Prof. Ramon G. Guillermo of UP Diliman published results of his attempt in a paper titled “Ina Bisa Kata: An Experimental Decipherment of the Calatagan Pot Inscription,” which has been posted in the Internet.

He said he used paleography, cryptography and “brute force” to crack the code and decipher the symbols around the mouth of the pot. He approached his task by transcribing in clockwise direction starting from the character at the break of the circle of symbols, similar to what Francisco and Potet had done.

In March [2008], Guillermo released the following translation of the text:

Sinikap sabihin ni ina /
Para sa iyo mahal kong anak /
Kumain ka sa aking dulang /
Dibdib ko ’tong mabango /
Doon ika’y mabasa /
Tulad ng bulaklak

His version carries a mother’s endearing message to her beloved child, the opposite of Tolentino’s interpretation.

But although the methods that Guillermo used were deemed scientific and technical enough in academic circles, and his output was declared “most definitive” in an Internet feature story, some sectors have lingering doubts about the final revelation. These doubts prodded me to contribute my effort to resolve the issue.

I first came across the Calatagan Pot mystery and Tolentino’s contribution from the INQUIRER column of Ambeth R. Ocampo on April 27, 2007. But I knew the details only lately while browsing online for articles on the old Philippine scripts.

I printed an illustration of the pot inscription and tried transcribing its text counterclockwise, contrary to previous attempts, starting at the line that broke from the circle. I provided equivalents of the symbols, using for references a table with three old Bisayan alphabets compiled by the late Fr. Cantius J. Kobak, OFM, and another table with the old Tagalog alphabet from a book of William Henry Scott.

Out of 40 symbols in the inscription, my initial attempt matched with 24 equivalents in Tolentino’s transcription, 25 in Francisco’s, 23 in Potet’s, and 21 in Guillermo’s. I later came up with the following full transcription of the text:

NA-BU-KA-NA-BA /
LA-BA-MA-NA-LA-DA-KI /
NI-NU-MA-NI-YA-MA-NGA /
GA-KA-KA-YA-LA-NGA-YA /
BA-YA-HA-DA-KI-NA-NU /
DA-KA-LA-BI-NA-GA-HA

I adopted the “ma” and “nga” for two similar symbols at the end of the third line from Tolentino, and “ya” at the end the fourth line from Potet; these are not found in existing scripts. After adding perceived missing vowels or consonants for some possible Bisayan keywords, I came up with the following interpretation:

Nabuká na ba? /
Labâ ma na lâ, dakit /
Nínu ma niya mangga /
Gakatkat hiya lâ ngay-an /
Bayâ ha dakit na, nu? /
Da kalág binagat, ha?

The single-syllable expressions in the text are decidedly Bisayan in tone and accent, the type that can still be heard from residents in the hinterlands of Samar Island.

While translating my interpretation to English, I found that the modern meanings of such keywords as “laba,” “ninu,” “katkat,” “dala” and “bagat” are not appropriate. So I looked for their old meanings, mainly from the Vocabulario de la Lengua Bisaya (Dagami, Leyte 1616; Manila 1711) by Fr. Mateo Sanchez, SJ.

Here is my translation:

Is it open now for sure? [the gateway to the spirit underworld]/
Take it as a gain already, dakit [Tag., balete] tree/
That [the soul] confused you for a mango tree/
[It] just crossed out of fear [to your domain] alone, is that so?/
Leave the dakit tree now, will you?/
Shame/Bring [back] the soul that you [were told to] encounter, okay?

I have already compiled a glossary of the 21 words possibly used in the pot inscription.

It now appears that the Calatagan artifact was a ritual pot particularly used as native incense burner for the expensive and elaborate “pag-uli” (return) ceremony of the pre-Hispanic Filipinos. This was presumably performed in front of a “dakit” (in Cebuano, “dalakit” in Leyte-Samar), a tree held sacred by the natives, to retrieve a soul believed to have just crossed over to the other realm, and to return this to its moribund earthly body.

The inscription essentially provides the outline of a three-stage monologue, presumably elaborated by a “babaylan” (native priestess) in a trance during the “pag-uli” ritual. It is alternately addressed to the spirit underworld on the one hand and to the “umalagad,” ancestor-spirit that the “babaylan” had commissioned for the soul-retrieval operation, on the other.

This pot was probably also used for ceremonies to retrieve victims of the “bugkut,” disappeared persons believed to have been abducted by fairies who dwell in the “dakit.”

A technical paper with details of the findings is being prepared for presentation to the academic and scientific community.

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