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This great literary work, consisting of several hundreds of large lithographed plans and drawings of sculptures and statues, with a complete account written by Dr. C. Leemans, director of the Public Museum at Leiden, was produced under the direction of the Dutch Minister of the Colonies.
The temples, the head-quarters of the old religion, show no traces of violence. They were destroyed, says Dr. Leemans, simply by "carelessness, disuse, and nature," not by a sanguinary war. Long before the Prince Fateléhan conquered the western kingdom of Sunda in 1524, Arab merchants had spread the principles of Islamism among the Javanese.
Remembering the fertility of the Eastern imagination, and the despotic character of Eastern rulers, it is easy to understand that such babads were more often than not reduced in point of veracity to the standard of an average fairy tale. M. Brumund, whose remarks on this subject are embodied in Leemans' work on the Boro-Boedoer temple, deals very severely with the babads.
Leemans, in his account of the building, enumerates five galleries; but in reality there are only four, since the outside of what he calls the first gallery is merely a second basis for the whole structure, as is shown by the nature of its decoration, viz. simple architectural designs and groups of deities. The lower terrace, of which Dr.
Leemans only guessed the existence, is now being excavated and photographed section by section. Only one section is kept open at any given time, because the earth is necessary to support the vast mass of stonework which forms the entire building, and it was for this reason, namely, to prevent the structure from breaking up, that this terrace was formerly banked up.
Many of my honored critics have censured these scenes; others, among whom are some whose opinion I specially value, have lavished the kindest praise upon them. Among these gentlemen I will mention A. Stahr, C. V. Holtei, M. Hartmann, E. Hoefer, W. Wolfsohn, C. Leemans, Professor Veth of Amsterdam, etc.
[Footnote 2: "Bôrô-Boedoer Temples," by Dr. C. Leemans,
Besides, all the other ancient writers who mention Horapollo at all leave us quite free to suppose that there may have been two sages of the same name as does C. Leemans, who is most intimately versed in the Hieroglyphica and the second certainly cannot have lived earlier than the VIIth century, since an accurate knowledge of hieroglyphic writing must have been lost far more completely in his time than we can suppose possible in the IVth century.
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