Several scholars tried, over time, to better understand the extant text of the Singapore Stone and, ultimately, to decipher it. In his 1834 work,
The Malay Peninsula, Captain Peter James Begbie of the Madras Artillery, part of the
Honourable East India Company, wrote: In the
Hikayat Abdullah,
Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir (1796–1854), also known as
Munshi Abdullah, recorded Raffles taking missionary Rev. Claudius Henry Thomsen and himself to see what Raffles described as a "remarkable stone" in October 1822. Raffles apparently took the view that the writing had to be
Hindu "because the Hindus were the oldest of all immigrant races in the East, reaching Java and Bali and Siam, the inhabitants of which are all descended from them".
William Bland and James Prinsep (Pali) by James Prinsep of Dr. William Bland's copy of the inscription on the Singapore Stone, which was published as Plate XXXVII in the
Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1837. In his note published in the
Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal of 1837, Dr. William Bland reported that he had "frequently made pilgrimages" to the Stone, "determined, if it were possible, to save a few letters, could they be satisfactorily made out, to tell us something, however, small, of the language or the people who inscribed it, and hence eke out our limited and obscure knowledge of the Malayan Peninsula." a posthumously published English translation of the
Sejarah Melayu (1612) by the British
orientalist John Leyden (1775–1811). According to the
Malay Annals, news of Badang's remarkable feats of strength reached the land of Kling (the
Coromandel Coast). The
Rajah of that country sent a champion named Nadi Vijaya Vicrama to try his strength with him, staking seven ships filled with treasures on the issue of the contest. After a few trials of their relative powers, Badang pointed to a huge stone lying before the Rajah's hall and asked his opponent to lift it, and to allow their claims to be decided by the greatest strength displayed in this feat. The Kling champion assented, and, after several failures, succeeded in raising it as high as his knee, after which he immediately let it fall. Badang took up the stone, poised it easily several times, and then threw it out into the mouth of the river, and this is the rock which is at this day visible at the point of Singhapura, or Tanjong Singhapura. The
Annals go on to state that after a long time, Badang died and was buried at the point of the straits of Singhapura, and when the tidings of his death reached the land of Kling, the Rajah sent two stone pillars to be raised over his grave as a monument, and these were the pillars which were still at the point of the bay. Begbie went on to speculate that the monument installed over Badang's grave was the sandstone slab at the mouth of the Singapore River, and that the inscription contained a recital of Badang's feats. He identified the "Rajah of Kling" as Sri Rajah Vicrama who reigned from 1223 to 1236. In Begbie's view, the inscription was in an obsolete dialect of
Tamil:
J.W. Laidlay, Iain Sinclair, Francesco Perono Cacciafoco, and I-Shiang Lee (Kawi) . J.W. Laidlay examined fragments of the sandstone slab that had been donated to
the Asiatic Society of Bengal by Colonel Butterworth and Lieutenant-Colonel James Low, strewing finely powdered animal charcoal over the surface of the stones and sweeping it gently with a feather so as to fill up all the depressions; in this way "the very slightest of which was thus rendered remarkably distinct by the powerful contrast of colour. By this means, and by studying the characters in different lights", Laidlay was able to make drawings of the inscriptions on three fragments. According to Laidlay, the fragment shown in the top drawing seemed to have been from the upper part of the inscription, but was omitted in Prinsep's
lithograph as effaced. He could not identify the other two fragments with any portion of the lithograph. Laidlay felt that the square shape of the characters had misled Prinsep into concluding that the inscription was in Pali. In fact, the characters bore no resemblance whatsoever to Pali. Laidlay was unable to identify the characters with those of any published
Sinhala inscriptions, but found it identical with
Kawi, a literary language from the islands of
Java,
Bali and
Lombok based on
Old Javanese with many
Sanskrit loanwords. He noted, "With the alphabet of this language, ... I can identify all, or nearly all, of the characters; but of course no clue to the purport of the inscription can be obtained without some knowledge of the language itself." Relying on Begbie, he, too, "conjectured with probability that the inscription is a record of some Javanese triumph at a period anterior to the conversion of the Malays to
Muhammadanism". Dr Sinclair, agreeing that the inscription was most likely Kawi, proceeded to identify the fragment "kesariva" in the inscriptions. Comparing this to a corpus of ancient Sanskrit writings, he suggested that the fragment was part of the word "parakesarivarman" – a title used by several kings of the Tamil
Chola dynasty in India. This suggests
Tamil connections with the Strait of Singapore as far back as 1,000 years ago, thus redefining the island's historical timeline. He suggests that the stone could have been created at the beginning of the 11th century, redefining Singapore's foundation over 300 years earlier than the currently accepted founding date of 1299. In August 2023, Francesco Perono Cacciafoco and I-Shiang Lee produced a comparison between the Singapore Stone and the
Calcutta Stone and further analyzed the possible link to the
Kawi script. They found that while there are similarities, there is a noticeable difference in the usage of
diacritics.
Studies by Kern and other scholars (Old Javanese or Sanskrit) The first effectual study of the sandstone fragments was by the Dutch
epigrapher Johan Hendrik Caspar Kern. He succeeded in deciphering a few words, including
salāgalalasayanara,
ya-āmānavana,
kesarabharala and
yadalama, but was unable to identify the language in which they were written. He gave the probable date of the inscription as around 1230. Another Dutch
Indologist, N.J. Krom, judged from a rubbing of the Stone published in 1848 that the script resembled that of the
Majapahit Empire but dated from a period somewhat earlier than 1360. Other scholars have taken different views. Dr. J.G. de Casparis, a scholar of ancient Indonesian writing, gave the preliminary judgment that the style of the script might date from an earlier period such as the 10th or 11th century. He was able to decipher one or two words, which seemed to be in the
Old Javanese language. On the other hand, Drs. Boechari, epigraphical expert of the Indonesian National Research Centre for Archaeology and lecturer at the
University of Indonesia, was of the opinion that the engraving dates from no later than the 12th century, has a closer affinity to the
Sumatran than the Javanese writing style, and that the language may not be Old Javanese but
Sanskrit, which was in common use in Sumatra at that era. John Miksic has commented that while it is impossible to determine whether de Casparis's or Boechari's theory is more correct on the basis of epigraphy alone, it is easier to accept the conclusion that the person who commissioned the inscription was culturally Sumatran rather than Javanese, because by the 10th century the linguistic influence of Java had reached the
Lampung region in the south of Sumatra, but no such influence has been discovered as far north as Singapore and there is no evidence of Javanese colonisation in Sumatra or the offshore islands at that time. Miksic notes that most conclusions regarding the slab have been on the basis of rubbings or photographs, and thus there is a "slight possibility" that detailed analysis of fragments of the sandstone slab may provide more information about the age of the inscription or the nature of its contents. However, he also says that the script probably never will be fully deciphered. ==Singapore Stone today==