Empus of the nom-noman era & their signatures

[A. G. Maisey]

Jaya, that is a "Nature of the Universe" question.

To get those answers you need many years of face to face contact with people who hold relevant opinions & beliefs. It is mostly opinions, or perhaps beliefs, that we are talking about. Keris knowledge covers numerous aspects, and those aspects are in many cases systems of belief, so ultimately keris knowledge boils down to knowledge of belief systems.

Throw this search term into google search & you'll get a few hits that might be of interest:-

Turun Temuruning Mpu Tanah Jawa

I do have a complete family tree of the empus of Jawa, taken from Turun Temuruning.

Identifying the work of individual makers is a very big step up on applying the tangguh indicators, it takes years & years of study & availability of good examples. You really need to join a good, established, Javanese keris study group to get even a start in this direction.

There are quite a few little booklets from years past that can assist, Keris Jawa by Haryoguritno has some info, as well as pictures of what are generally accepted as the rondha form used by some of the high ranking Surakarta makers of the recent past.

To get to the guts of all this info you need Bahasa Indonesia as a minimum, & preferably a working knowledge of Basa Jawa. If you do have these languages I can give you the titles of a few books you could start looking for.

If you are located in Jawa, the Mangkunegaraan library in Solo has more than a few publications that deal with keris, & you can buy foto copies of these books --- or at least you could in the past, I do not know about now.