[Gutenberg 41770] • Studies in Moro History, Law, and Religion

The history of Mindanao prior to the advent of Islam is traditional and mythological, and no effort has been made to put it on record. With Islam came knowledge, art, and civilization. A new system of government was instituted and its records were registered. Tarsila1 were written and the noble lineage of the datus was carefully kept. Each sultanate or datuship kept a separate genealogy. These genealogies, called tarsila or salsila, were very limited in their scope and brief in their narration of events. They are our only source of written information on the early history of the Moros, and are valuable on that account. Previously the Moros withheld these tarsila and kept them away from all foreigners and non-Mohammedans; but their attitude has changed lately, and several different salsila were secured from the chief datus of the Rio Grande Valley.

The original manuscripts could not be bought, but exact and true copies of the same have been secured and translated and their translations are herein published for the first time.

The Transliteration

These tarsila are written in the Magindanao dialect with Arabic characters, and a great part of their text is Magindanao names which have never yet been expressed by means of Romanic characters. In translating these tarsila such a large number of words have to be transliterated that it is deemed necessary to adopt a system of transliteration which can be easily understood by every English reader and which is more adequate to express Magindanao sounds than either Spanish or [12]English. Such a system is herein adopted and is briefly described as follows:

With the exception of ng and sh, the characters used in this system are simple and represent simple sounds only. Every radical modification of a certain simple sound is regarded as a different simple sound and is represented by a separate and distinct character. Every compound sound is represented by those characters that express its simple constituent sounds. It is an unvarying rule in this system that every character represents an invariable sound and every sound has only one invariable character. The Magindanao dialect has only twenty-seven simple sounds and can be expressed by twenty-seven simple characters. These characters are the following: