Home›Open Questions›When did Sunan Kalijaga live, and does any record contemporary with him exist?Open QuestionsWhen did Sunan Kalijaga live, and does any record contemporary with him exist?Citation FormatsGeneral ReferenceGeneral Reference Citation TextDivinity Atlas. "When did Sunan Kalijaga live, and does any record contemporary with him exist?." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://www.divinityatlas.com/open-questions-index/when-did-sunan-kalijaga-live-and-does-any-record-contemporary-with-him-exist.Copy General ReferenceAPA StyleAPA Style Citation TextDivinity Atlas. (n.d.). When did Sunan Kalijaga live, and does any record contemporary with him exist?. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://www.divinityatlas.com/open-questions-index/when-did-sunan-kalijaga-live-and-does-any-record-contemporary-with-him-existCopy APA StyleBibTeXBibTeX Citation Text@misc{divinityatlas-when-did-sunan-kalijaga-live-and-does-an, author = {Divinity Atlas}, title = {When did Sunan Kalijaga live, and does any record contemporary with him exist?}, year = {2026}, url = {https://www.divinityatlas.com/open-questions-index/when-did-sunan-kalijaga-live-and-does-any-record-contemporary-with-him-exist}, note = {Accessed August 30, 2026} }Copy BibTeXOpen QuestionCross-Tradition ConnectionsSourcesComments (0)Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)Open QuestionEverything told about him comes from Javanese babad and hagiographic literature composed two to four centuries after the period it describes, mostly at the courts of Surakarta and Yogyakarta. No dated inscription, no sixteenth-century Portuguese or Malay report, and no archival document has been securely connected to him. The result is not a disagreement between scholars but an absence: no defended set of dates exists to disagree about.What would resolve this A dated epigraphic find at Kadilangu or at the Demak mosque naming him would give the cycle a fixed point. So would an early European or Malay archival mention independent of the babad tradition. Failing either, a systematic codicological dating of the earliest babad manuscripts would at least establish when the figure took his present shape, which is a smaller but answerable question.OpenJavanese philology and codicology; Islamic epigraphy of Java; early modern archival history of the Indonesian archipelagoSumarsam, Gamelan: Cultural Interaction and Musical Development in Central JavaCross-Tradition ConnectionsQuestion OnSunan Kalijaga, Historical Figures Well-attested Source Gamelan: Cultural Interaction and Musical Development in Central JavaSumarsamtier 1SourcesGamelan: Cultural Interaction and Musical Development in Central Javatier 1Sumarsam, University of Chicago Press, 1995View the SourceComments (0)No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.Sign in to join the discussion.Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.View At A Past YearThe atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.Show This Year