Artifact in Sanskrit Found in the Philippines

Source: www.organiser.org

THE PHILIPPINES : In 1989, a man in the concrete business was dredging sand at the mouth of the Lumbang River near Laguna de Bay when he uncovered a blackened roll of metal. He unfurled the roll he saw that it was a sheet of copper with strange writing on it, about the size of a magazine. He offered the copper sheet to one of the antiques dealers in the area who bought it for next to nothing. The dealer, in turn, tried to sell it for a profit but when he found no buyers, he eventually sold it to the Philippine National Museum. In 1990, Antoon Postma, a Dutch expert in ancient Philippine scripts and Mangyan writing, and a long-time resident of the Philippines, translated the document that came to be known as the Laguna Copperplate Inscription (LCI). When he saw that the writing looked similar to the ancient Indonesian script called Kavi, and that the document bore a date from the ancient Sanskrit calendar, he enlisted the help of fellow Dutchman, Dr Johann de Casparis, whose area of expertise was ancient Indonesia. In 1996, a Filipino history buff in California, Hector Santos, precisely converted the Sanskrit date over to our calendar by using astronomical software and some historical detective work. He determined that the Sanskrit date written on the plate was exactly Monday, April 21, 900 CE.