your bridge home
True Valor
A copper plate dug out of a river in 1989 turned out to be a debt receipt from the year 900, written in a script from South India.
In 1989, a man dredging sand from the Lumban river in Laguna province brought up a sheet of copper with writing on it.
It turned out to be the oldest dated document ever found in the Philippines.
And it was written in a script that came from South India.
The Laguna Copperplate Inscription is dated in the text itself, in the Shaka era, year 822, which is 900 CE.
It is not a poem or a scripture. It is a legal receipt.
A certificate recording that a man named Namwaran has had a large debt in gold forgiven. And that his descendants are cleared of it too.
It names officials, places and a date. It is a state paper. From a working state, with a bureaucracy. Six hundred years before the Spanish arrived.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.