Java by Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore — Read

The fact is not generally appreciated that there are ruins of Buddhist and Brahmanic temples in Middle Java surpassing in extent and magnificence anything to be seen in Egypt or India. There, in the heart of the steaming tropics, in that summer land of the world below the equator, on an island where volcanoes cluster more thickly and vegetation is richer than in any other region of the globe, where earthquakes continually rock and shatter, and where deluges descend during the rainy half of the year, remains nearly intact the temple of Boro Boedor, covering almost the same area as the Great Pyramid of Gizeh. It is ornamented with hundreds of life-size statues and miles of bas-reliefs presenting the highest examples of Greco-Buddhist art-a sculptured record of all the arts and industries, the culture and civilization, of the golden age of Java, of the life of the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries in all the farther East-a record that is not written in hieroglyphs, but in plainest pictures carved by sculptor's chisel. That solid pyramidal temple, rising in magnificent sculptured terraces, that was built without mortar or cement, without column or pillar or arch, is one of the surviving wonders of the world. On the spot it seems a veritable miracle.

It is one of the romances of Buddhism that this splendid monument of human industry, abandoned by its worshipers as one cult succeeded another, and forgotten after the Mohammedan conquest imposed yet another creed upon the people, should have disappeared completely, hidden in the tangle of tropical vegetation, a formless, nameless, unsuspected mound in the heart of a jungle, lost in every way, with no part in the life of the land, finally to be uncovered to the sight of the nineteenth century. When Sir Stamford Raffles came as British governor of Java in 1811, the Dutch had possessed the island for two centuries, but in their greed for gulden had paid no heed to the people, and knew nothing of that earlier time before the conquest when the island was all one empire, the arts and literature flourished, and, inspired by Hindu influence, Javanese civilization reached its highest estate; nor did the Hollander allow any alien investigators to peer about this profitable plantation. Sir Stamford Raffles, in his five years of control, did a century's work. He explored, excavated, and surveyed the ruined temples, and searching the voluminous archives of the native princes, drew from the mass of romantic legends and poetic records the first "History of Java. " His officers copied and deciphered inscriptions, and gradually worked out all the history of the great ruins, and determined the date of their erection at the beginning of the seventh century.