Java is one of the 300-odd islands of the Republic of Indonesia. It is not the largest—Borneo-Kalimantan and Sumatra are much bigger. Java is even smaller than Britain, the largest of the British Isles, but it has almost twice the population. With about 100 million people it is one of the most densely populated areas in the world, making Javanese the twelfth most spoken language in the world.

Historically and culturally, Java is and always has been the chief island of that vast archipelago called Insulinde (“Islands of the Indies”), or, in Sanskrit, Nusantara (“Islands of the East”). Altogether, natives of the Indonesian islands speak over 300 languages, all of which are related except those in Irian and the interior of New Guinea.

Of all these languages, Old Javanese is the oldest known; it flourished in the Middle Ages, during the same centuries as Anglo-Saxon. Javanese has its own script of elegant characters, originally based on Sanskrit, and is closely related to Malay-Indonesian but it is quite distinct, as English is from German. The Javanese have very extensive literature in prose and poetry dating from the early Middle Ages, much of it available only in manuscripts, unpublished and unknown, in the libraries of Java. From these manuscripts—among which are chronicles, long poems, and much more—the present collection of fables was taken as an example of early Oriental wit and wisdom.

The Javanese people colonized the island before the birth of Christ. Indian merchants, adventurers, and Brahmin priests settled there during the early centuries of the Christian era, creating the Hindu-Javanese civilization as they blended with the populace. Later, Buddhist teachers arrived, and by about A.D. 800, Java was a center of Buddhist learning and literature, radiating toward Siam and Cambodia.

In the ninth century the Borobudur was founded as an open-air temple for study and meditation. It was perhaps in those prosperous years that the manuscript was written from which the present collection of fables was chosen. It is not a literal translation from the famous Sanskrit works Panchatantra and Hitophadesha but rather was written after the stories had functioned as folktales for many years, which explains why the work now has typical Javanese features, such as Javanese names for some of the characters and animals, which are not found in the Indian literature. This course of development is what makes these tales so fresh and original, and yet so wise.