MANILA, Philippines—Whenever I ask my students what they associate with the words “prehistory” or “prehistoric,” they often mention dinosaurs and cavemen. While these things figure prominently in our history, we tend to forget that history is based on writing, that history is based on the past recorded in writing. Historians thus work with written sources either in manuscript (as in handwritten materials) or printed text (as in books, magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, posters etc.).

These materials are often found in archives and libraries that have gone through a lot of battering in the past century. The Philippines is particularly unfortunate because much of its cultural materials were destroyed during the Battle for Manila in 1945. Thus historians often reach a dead end when the material they seek or need happens to have been “destroyed during the war.”

Once while doing research in the Great Reading Room of the British Library in Bloomsbury, London, I requested to see a particularly rare 17th-century pamphlet that could not be located. I asked not once but thrice and got the same answer, so I asked to speak with a supervisor who then explained that the material I needed was destroyed during one of the German air raids on London during World War II. The librarian looked sorry for me, and with a gleam in his eyes he said, “Well, Mr. Ocampo, you can blame the Germans for the destruction of this rare work which is important for your study of the Philippine past.”

I was told that four great libraries survived the war because of an unwritten agreement between the British and German air forces. The Germans promised not to bomb Oxford and Cambridge if the British reciprocated by sparing Heidelberg and Tubingen. If this story is true, then these ancient university towns and their libraries survived the horrors and destruction of the last world war because some military and political officials were civilized enough to respect these institutions of higher learning.

Unfortunately for us, the University of the Philippines Library was torched by the Japanese, and the National Library and Museum, then housed in what we now call the “Old Congress,” was one of the casualties of the Battle for Manila. We can never truly know the extent of the destruction but reading descriptions of the National Library before the war makes me weep.

In 1912 three “pre-Spanish” documents were donated to the library by one Jose E. Marco. One manuscript was described as written on tree bark with cuttlefish ink. The Bulletin of the Philippine Library in September 1913 described the manuscript collections, stating that one of the national treasures was a collection of Jose Rizal manuscripts. Mention was made of the originals of “Noli Me Tangere,” “El Filibusterismo” and “Ultimo Adios” that have survived to our time, but the manuscripts that make me very curious were described as follows:

“Those of first importance historically are three manuscripts written in the old Visayan characters on bonga bark. These constitute the greatest literary find ever made in the Philippine Islands. They were found in the Island of Negros and were obtained for the library by the care and interest of a young Filipino, Mr. Jose E. Marco, who was educated in American schools, and who appreciates the value of historical material much above the average. Although they have not yet been deciphered, it is known that they relate to certain old beliefs of the people. The key to their transcription is known, and their translation into English is only a matter of time. Their importance lies in the fact that they are the only known manuscripts of this class that have been preserved. The early friar missionaries are said to have destroyed many in their zeal to rid the land of all heathen influences. Several of the friar convents in Manila possess a few samples of the ancient writing, but they are written on paper and are mainly names of persons. The age of the library manuscripts can as yet only be guessed at as perhaps between one and two centuries, although it is not impossible that they might have been written nearer the time of the first Spanish settlements in 1565.

“Old Spanish writers assert that the Visayans could not write at the time of the conquest, but that the Tagalogs could. If this be true, the Visayans learned the art of writing after the advent of the Spaniards, and if so, this determines roughly the age of these literary treasures. When discovered first, these manuscripts appear to have been covered with a resinous gum which acted as a preservative. It is reported by certain ethnologists that the half-wild mountain people of Negros carry native writings as charms, and that they guard these very jealously. In this connection should, perhaps, be mentioned the bamboo tools owned by the library on which are etched the curious characters employed today by the Mangyans of Mindoro. These are modern and were made especially for the library through the interest of Commissioner Worcester.”

While later scholarship has proven these to be forgeries—including the so-called Code of Kalantiaw—I’m still curious to know what these bogus documents looked like so that I could further understand the work of Jose E. Marco, who made a mark in the writing of early Philippine history.

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Comments are welcome at aocampo@ateneo.edu.