The stories known as Maragtas are legends that can be based on real events in the distant past. They are about the ten datus or chiefs who escaped the tyranny of Datu Makatunaw of Borneo and migrated to the island of Panay. There they bought the lowland plains of the island from Marikudo, the chief of the indigenous Aytas. According to legend, these ten chiefs and their families are the ancestors of the entire Visaya population. This is the legend celebrated every year in the Ati-atihan festival since the late 1950s, when it became part of the annual Santo Ni±ao festival in Kalibo, Aklan. The Codex of Maragtas is the most important example of written law and is considered the oldest, as it was in force from 1250. M13 Error in Pavón`s manuscriptIn addition to the dubious origin of the Code of Kalantiaw and Pavóns Leyendes that contains it, these documents themselves are highly suspect. The title of the codex is The 17 Theses or Laws of the Regulos [Datus], which have been in use since 1433150 (sic), but there are actually 18 laws listed, covering about forty different crimes, and not 16 laws, as reported by Artigas in 1913. And of course, the data in the title makes no sense.

In the 1800s, it was still common to abbreviate dates by omitting the first digits or two of a year, but never the last. Therefore, the number 150 was not a contraction of the year 1500. It could only mean 1150, which is just as absurd as 150. The second chapter of the second part of Leyendes tells the story of the construction of the fortress Kalantiaw in 433. Although this number is a correct abbreviation of 1433, the same year Kalantiaw is said to have written his laws, the document showing this date is said to have been written in 1137! And despite the fact that ancient Filipinos did not have a clock or time measurement equivalent to one hour, Kalantiaw`s third law condemns a man to swim for three hours if he cannot afford to take care of his wives, while his fifth law provides for the penalty of one hour of flogging. In the same year, a Spanish version of the codex was published and discussed by Josuã© Soncuya in six chapters of his Historia Prehispana. K6 Soncuya, from Banga, Aklan, conferred the title of “Rajah Kalantiaw” on the great legislator and concluded that the codex was written for Aklan, Panay and not Negros because he discovered two Akanon words in the text. He overlooked the fact that the title of the book that told the stories of Kalantiaw was The Ancient Legends of the Island of Negros and that it was written on this island by José Pavón©, whose manuscripts were discovered there by Josã© Marco, a native of Negros, and according to these manuscripts, Kalantiaw built his fortress on the island of Negros. In 1917, historian José Marco wrote about the Code of Kalantiaw in his book Historia Prehispana de Filipinas (“Pre-Hispanic History of the Philippines”), in which he moved the place of origin of the Negros Codex to the Panay Province of Aklan, suspecting that it might be related to the Ati-atihan festival. Other authors throughout the 20th century gave credence to history and code. It was first accepted scientifically when Marco donated five manuscripts of the falsified documents to American historian James Alexander Robertson.

Robertson introduced it to San Francisco in 1915 in an article entitled Social Structure and Ideas of Law Among the First Filipino Peoples, in a recently discovered pre-Hispanic penal code of the Philippine Islands. Robertson was a notable supporter of the anti-Spanish propaganda of the “black legend” and had also intentionally distorted translations of Spanish documents from the Philippines in the compilation The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (1903-1907), co-authored with Emma Helen Blair. [5] The improbable dates are typical of all the documents José Marco claims to have discovered©. The alleged perpetrator of Leyendes, José© Marãa Pavón, translated the Kalantiaw code and five other pre-Hispanic documents, but did not explain how he calculated their data. He himself even wrote that the ancient Visayans did not track the years for a while, but his “exact” translation of a document purportedly written in 1489, decades before Western culture made contact with the Philippines, mentioned the “first Friday of the year” and years with “three equal numbers, like 1777.” He also mentioned coins of King Charles V of Spain, who was only born in 1500. In his book Struggle for Freedom (2008), Cecilio Duka provides a complete interpretation of the code for the “critical examination” of the reader. to decide on its accuracy and accuracy”. [16] Who was Josã© Marãa Pavón? Brother José Pavón© y Araguro recognized many sources of information for his books: informants who could not be found, documents unknown, authors who had already died or even not been born, or who, due to other circumstances, could not have written the documents attributed to them. It is therefore no coincidence that the story of Pavón`s life, as described in his manuscripts, was equally dubious.

Pavón`s own writings were also curious. The title pages of Leyendes were obviously hand-drawn, but designed to look like printed text. Different font styles were mixed and the capital letters “I” were even dotted. (As in the example above.) The spelling in both volumes of Leyendes was also irregular. The spelling of Volume 1, written in 1838, was similar to the spelling of the 1500s. For the second volume, in 1839, Pavón wrote that he had adopted the “numerous spelling changes” contained in the last dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy, and that the style of volume 2 was appropriate for the time, but not consistent with this dictionary. However, Pavón did not explain how he could use these new spellings in a document he wrote in 1837, while he did not yet know them in 1838. This document was Brujerãas y los Cuentos de Fantasmas and it was also “discovered” by José©Marco. Scott then published his findings, which debunked the code, in his book Prehispanic Source Materials for the Study of Philippine History. [7] Filipino historians then removed the code from future literature on the history of the Philippines. [8] When Antonio M.

Molina published a Spanish version of his book The Philippines Through the Centuries as Historia de Filipinas (Madrid, 1984),[9] he replaced the code with a sentence: La tesis doctoral del historador Scott desbarata la existencia misma de dicho Código. (“Historian Scott`s doctoral dissertation destroys the existence of the code.”) [10] The Code of Rajah Kalantiaw was an alleged code of law in the epic story of the Maragtas, believed to have been written in 1433 by Datu Kalantiaw, a chief of the island of Negros in the Philippines. It is now generally accepted by historians that documents supporting the existence and history of the codex “appear to be deliberate inventions without historical validity.” written in 1913 by a priest named José Marco as part of a historical fiction entitled Las antiguas leyendas de la Isla de Negros (German: The ancient legends of the island of Negros). [1] [2] In 1965, William Henry Scott, then a doctoral student at the University of Santo Tomas, began a survey of pre-Hispanic sources for the study of Philippine history. Scott eventually revealed that the code was a forgery committed by Marco. When Scott presented these findings in his doctoral dissertation, which he published on the 16th. In June 1968, when he defended himself before a panel of prominent Filipino historians, including Teodoro Agoncillo, Horacio de la Costa, Marcelino Foronda, Mercedes Grau Santamaria, Nicolas Zafra and Gregorio Zaide, not a single question was asked about the chapter, which he had called The Contributions of José E.