Naskah-naskah Moloku Kie Raha: Suatu Tinjauan Umum

Moloku Kie Raha is a term used for referring the four local authorities in Maluku that known as Kolano: Ternate, Tidore, Bacan, dan Jailolo. As a key region in the shipping lanes during the "Silk Road" era, the presence of immigrants (Javanese, Chinese, Arab, and European) in the 14-17 centuries who brought their cultures and languages and interacted with local culture had established the local written culture. The scribe of the the Ternate sultanate said that since the past the palace also served as the scriptorium, which is where the hikayat, treaty, political documents, genealogy, and folklore which are associated with the sultanate, was written. This article is the result of codicological research that examines the physical manuscript as a focus. This research has inventoried the existence of 67 manuscripts of 12 owners that have been successfully recorded and digitized. When reading the content, the manuscripts were written about Islamic doctrines, king's letter, sufism order, hikayat, genealogy, history, laws of inheritance, horoscope, and levo-levo (amulet) while they are written in the Arabic and Jawi scripts in Arabic and Malay languages.