Kawi script
ancient Javanese abugida
The Kawi script or the Old Javanese script is a historic Brahmic script used across Maritime Southeast Asia between the 8th century and the 16th century. The Kawi corpus is especially abundant in Java, but materials in Kawi have also been found in Sumatra, the Malay Peninsula, Bali, Thailand, and the Philippines. The script is frequently used to write the Old Javanese language, but whole texts (or parts thereof) in Sanskrit, Old Malay, Old Balinese, Old Sundanese, and Old Khmer have also been found written in the Kawi script.
History
The Kawi script gradually evolved from the 'Pallava' script (or 'Late Southern Brāhmī') which were dispersed to maritime Southeast Asia in multiple waves from southern India since around the 4th century CE. The Kawi script tend to be more cursive than the lithic 'Pallava' script and shows more pronounced features of palm leaf writing techniques. From the mid-8th century, plain but functional Kawi was widely used for chancery documents such as land grants and royal edicts. Towards the end of the first millennium, more calligraphic Kawi variations emerged in conjunction with the development of Old Javanese literary tradition, especially the kakawin genre. As Kawi use spread, it developed many stylistic variants and came to be used for texts in multiple languages. Specimens has been found as far away as Thailand (e.g. Grahi inscription for writing Old Khmer) and the Philippines (e.g. Laguna Copperplate Inscription for writing Old Malay).
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Kawi script” as ancient Javanese abugida. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q975802. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kawi script” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.