The Chronicles of the Ancient Filipino

Hist 1 (Philippine History) Brief Essay Number 1

“No document, no history,” as the late Filipino historian Teodoro Agoncillo once said (Ocampo 2018). Since time immemorial, it has been a challenge for Filipino historians to extensively study the early Filipino baranganic societies, due to lack of written records. Add that to the fact that our perception of Philippine history is deeply influenced by Spanish and American historiography (Constantino 1975), which made us forgetful and unappreciative of our precolonial past. Most written sources that we have on early Philippine societies came from the likes of Antonio Pigafetta, Juan de Plasencia, Pedro Chirino, and Antonio de Morga (Scott 1994), which all possess Eurocentric biases. Pseudohistories like Jose E. Marco’s Code of Kalantiaw also presents to be an obstacle towards an accurate precolonial narrative, which begs the question, how do we know for certain that what we know about our history prior to the arrival of Europeans is true?

Defining History

But first, what is “History” anyway? Although historians still disagree on what precisely does it mean, but in a general sense, History is about the study of human affairs in the past through written records. It is important to realize that the words “History” and “the Past” are not the same (Jenkins 2003). The Past can go way back to 13.8 billion years ago when all matter, space, and time expanded from a hot, dense state; but History can only go back as far as circa 3200 BCE. Because this is the time when the cuneiform, the oldest writing system in history, was invented in ancient Mesopotamia (Feldherr and Hardy 2011). The invention of writing is what separates prehistory from history.

However, the histories of every nation did not begin simultaneously. The history of ancient Egypt started around the 32nd millennium BCE through the birth of Egyptian hieroglyphs (Allen 2010), but the history of ancient Philippines only began on 900 CE, due to the discovery of a Kawi script in the Laguna Copperplate Inscription, the earliest written record found in our archipelago (Postma 1992). But it is also not the case that all societies with developed writing systems chronicled their past in a more objective manner like we do today. It was not until the Classical Antiquity when History as a discipline was established in ancient Greece by the likes of Herodotus (Ἡρόδοτος) and Thucydides (Θουκυδίδης); while in the East, it was started in ancient China by Sīmǎ Qiān (司馬遷).

Most historians approached the study of History by the observation of facts in the past, or as the German historian Leopold von Ranke puts it, “wie es eigentlich gewesen ist” (how it actually was) (Stern 1956). But chronicling the past does not end with mere description of events, as it also includes the creative reimagination of historical occurrences. British historian Edward Hallett Carr described the relationship between History and the historian, stating that “History consists of a corpus of ascertained facts. The facts are available to the historian in documents, inscriptions, and so on, like fish on the fishmonger’s slab. The historian collects them, takes them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to him” (Carr 1961).

Where do we get all of our historical information? Practitioners of history often deal with the two kinds of sources: the primary and secondary sources (University of Massachusetts Boston n.d.). The former can be categorized into written sources (such as Anne Frank’s diary, Rizal’s letters, a 1929 New York Times newspaper, or the Rosetta Stone) and non-written sources (such as Michelangelo’s David, the Golden Tara of Agusan, or the jade statues of Aztec god Quetzalcoatl) that were made contemporary to a particular period. Secondary sources, however, pertain to the indirect documents usually written by someone who was not born or witnessed a certain historical event that they are writing about, adding some interpretations and analyses on that event. Great examples are the history books written by modern historians like Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Leon Maria Guerrero’s The First Filipino, and Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization.

The Written Documents Conundrum

Precolonial Filipinos were notorious for not writing their own histories, aside from the fact that the introduction of formal writing systems to our ancestors were delayed. To put it into perspective, the earliest writing system found in the Philippines was approximately written a century after Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne as the first emperor of the Holy Roman Empire (Becher 2003).

Early Filipinos tend to pass their stories orally rather than to record them permanently, and Baybayin, the abugida script of Tagalogs and some Visayans, was only widely used around 16th to 17th century. In addition, they wrote their scripts on tree barks, bamboo tubes, and leaves using knives, daggers, pointed sticks, and/or iron as their pen (Agoncillo 1990), all which can be easily decayed over time. The ancients used Baybayin not to the purpose of recording narratives, but to create short poems and personal messages to each other. As the Boxer Codex notes, “They have neither books nor histories nor do they write anything of length but only letters and reminders to one another... [And lovers] carry written charms with them” (Scott 1994). Considering all of this, how would we expect early Filipinos to have a developed first-hand historical narrative from their point of view?

Going back to our original question, this is the point where the fields of archaeology, anthropology, and ethnography enter the picture. Through the numerous artifacts and relics that they have left behind, we can make educated inferences on how they probably lived in the past. The Manunggul Jar, for example, is a reflection of ancient Palaweños’ strong maritime culture being tied to their concept of the afterlife, as shown by its figure of two people are sailing in a boat on the top cover. The jar shows how early Filipinos, despite differences, share a common heritage with their Austronesian ancestors (Chua 1997).

Furthermore, not all precolonial ethnic tribes in the Philippines were vanquished after the years of Western conquest. There are plenty of them that are still alive and thriving today, and a direct ethnographic observation of them can tell us a great deal of information about how they lived before. The Bul-ul worship of Ifugao tribe is a case in point. Bul-ul is a carved idol of a squatted person that represents as the guardian of the Ifugao’s rice fields, believing that they possess the soul of their deceased ancestor to bring good harvest and health to the tribe. The supernatural powers of a Bul-ul will only work after a ritual led by a tribal priest called mumbaki (Dancel 1989). Anthropologists do not even have to dig for these idols and theorize about this; all they have to do is to observe the living Ifugaos practicing it.

A Divided Nation of Ethnic Groups

Another struggle for the search of a unifying precolonial historical narrative is the fact that we live in an archipelago, culturally separated by natural barriers. If we think about it, there really is no such thing as a “precolonial Filipino” since the word “Filipino” originally pertained to the pureblood Spaniards born in the Philippines, which itself is not called to the archipelago until Ruy Lopez de Villalobos named it after Prince Felipe de Asturias, the future King Felipe II of Spain, in 1543 (Scott 1994).

The point is, our ancestors would not think about depicting the whole archipelago being a united country, but instead a group of separated tribes trying to get along with each other. The datus, rajahs, lakans, and sultans of various polities and kingdoms such as Tondo, Cebu, Butuan, Namayan, and Sulu were known for their political alliances and trades with each other, but will never imagine themselves having a common patriotic pride of being a single nation. The only common struggle that they share is the exploitation and subjugation of the Western powers.

Natives would often identify themselves as either Tagalog, Visayan, Ilocano, Kapampangan, Moro, or any other else, but it was only during the late 19th century when they started to call themselves as a “Filipino.” The writer Leon Maria Guerrero argued that it was Jose Rizal who first envisioned about a united archipelago, consisting of a “compact and homogenous society of all the old tribal communities from Batanes to the Sulu Sea based on common interests and mutual protection,” instead of the idea of double allegiance to the Spanish crown and the Catholic Church (Guerrero 1961).

Conclusion

History is more than just about gathering the facts and putting it together to form a narrative. It is a tool to shape the unifying identity of a nation; to enrich, preserve, and value the various cultures of every ethnic group; to find out who we really are as a race, apart from the prejudicial Western perspective about us. “He who does not know not know how to look back at where he came from will never get to his destination,” as the saying goes.

Bibliography

• Agoncillo, Teodoro. 1990. History of the Filipino People (8th Edition). Quezon City: R. P. Garcia Publishing Co.

• Allen, James P. 2010. Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs. Cambridge University Press.

• Becher, Matthias. 2003. Charlemagne. Yale University Press.

• Carr, Edward H. 1961. What is History? London: Penguin Books, Ltd.

• Chua, Michael Charleston B. 1997. THE MANUNGGUL JAR AS A VESSEL OF HISTORY. April 27. Accessed October 14, 2021. http://www.artesdelasfilipinas.com/archives/50/the-manunggul-jar-as-a-vessel-of-history.

• Constantino, Renato. 1975. The Philippines: A Past Revisited. Quezon City: Tala Publishing Services.

• Dancel, Marilou M. 1989. "The Ifugao Wooden Idol." SPAFA Digest, Vo. 10, No. 1 2-5.

• Feldherr, Andrew, and Grant Hardy. 2011. The Oxford History of Historical Writing: Volume 1: Beginnings to AD 600. Oxford University Press.

• Guerrero, Leon Maria. 1961. The First Filipino. Manila: Jose Rizal National Centennial Commission.

• Jenkins, Keith. 2003. Rethinking History. London: Routledge Classics.

• Ocampo, Ambeth. 2018. Prehistory, history and posthistory. December 14. Accessed October 12, 2021. https://opinion.inquirer.net/118159/prehistory-history-and-posthistory.

• Postma, Antoon. 1992. "The Laguna Copper-Plate Inscription: Text and Commentary." Philippine Studies 182-203.

• Scott, William Henry. 1994. Barangay: Sixteenth Century Philippine Culture and Society. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press.

• Stern, Fritz. 1956. "The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to Present." 57. London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd.

• University of Massachusetts Boston. n.d. Primary Sources: A Research Guide. Accessed October 13, 2021. https://umb.libguides.com/PrimarySources/secondary.

Passed on October 14, 2021