A priest’s bell and a temple lamp: reinterpretation of the function of some Kedah artefacts
F.E. Treloar’s short note proposes reinterpretations of two bronze artefacts excavated by H.G. Quaritch Wales at Kedah sites in the 1930s, arguing that a “trident of Siva” from Candi Bukit Batu Pahat (Site 8) is in fact the top of a Siva priest’s hand-bell, and that a “fragmentary base of an image” from the same site is the central dish of a bronze hanging temple lamp (p. 48).
Summary
Treloar draws on a comparison with a bronze bell (no. 7131) in the Jakarta Museum, documented in the Royal Batavian Society of Art and Science Yearbook (1941) and illustrated by A.J. Bernet Kempers, to demonstrate that the Kedah “trident” matches in size and style the head of a Siva priest’s hand-bell of the type still in use from India to Bali (p. 49). He further identifies the “image base” as the central dish of a bronze hanging temple lamp comparable to no. 7950 in the Jakarta Museum, described as used for religious dance ceremonies in Central Sumatra, 13th century. The similarity in form and size between the “bronze aureole” from Wales’s Site 16 and the suspending aureole surrounding the dancing figure in the Jakarta lamp is noted as additional supporting evidence (p. 49). Treloar concludes that these reinterpretations, while adding little to debates over Indian versus indigenous origins of Bujang Valley ritual culture, demonstrate close cultural and trading links between Kedah and Sumatra during the late Sri Vijayan period, and advocates a fragment-by-fragment analytical approach to building up a picture of the period’s culture (p. 49).