An Account of 
Some of the Oldest Malay MSS. 
now extant. 
By THE REV. W. G. SHELLABEAR, 
By the courtesy of the librarians of the British Museum, 
the Bodleian library at Oxford, and the University library at 
Leiden, I was enabled in the summer of 1895 to make careful 
copies of some very old Malay manuscripts which are preserved 
in those libraries. As far as I have been able to discover, these 
mss. have never before been noticed in any scientific journal, 
and have never even been examined by anyone capable of un- 
derstanding their historic and philological interest. This is the 
more remarkable in the case of those in the Bodleian library 
since it is probable that they are the oldest Malay mss. now 
extant, and are therefore of peculiar value to the student from 
their bearing upon the Malay language and literature. 
I had also an opportunity of making a brief examination of 
six interesting Malay mss. which are the property of the Cam- 
bridge University library, but as these have been described at 
great length by Dr. 8. van Ronkel in Part 2 of the 6th Series 
of Bijdragen tot de Taal- Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch- 
Indié, it is only necessary here to say that they were the pro- 
perty of a Dutch scholar, Erpenius, who died in 1624, and three 
of them appear from signatures to have belonged to a certain 
Pieter Willemsz. van Elbinck, who was at Acheen in 1604, went 
to the Eastern Archipelago again in 1611, and died in 1615 in 
London, two years after his return. 
The manuscripts described ih this paper consist of six letters, 
and a copy of the Hikayat Sri Rama, which is a Malay transla- 
tion of the famous Ramayana. The letters are arranged, as nearly 
as can be ascertained, in chronological order, and at the end of 
the paper has been placed an extract from the Hikayat Sri Rama, 
sufficient to give a good idea of the spelling and of the diver- 
