Code of Kalantiaw

The Code of Kalantiaw is a penal code which has been believed to govern pre-Hispanic Philippine
society written by Datu Kalantiaw, a chief on the island of Negros in the Philippines, in 1433 a century
before Magellan arrived in the Philippines. A penal code is a document which possesses a significant
amount of a particular jurisdiction of criminal law against committed crimes and offenses. The Code of
Kalantiaw thus establishes the basis of a society for pre-colonial Filipinos. The Code of Kalantiaw
embodies the capital punishment for crimes such as stealing, sneaking in the house of a datu and even
adultery with his wife.

The code is now believed by many historians to have been a hoax and that it had actually been
written in 1913 by Jose E. Marco as a part of his historical fiction Las antiguas leyendas de la Isla de
Negros (The Ancient Legends of the Island of Negros), which he attributed to a priest named Jose Maria
Pavon.

In 1965, William Henry Scott began an examination of pre-Hispanic sources for the study of
Philippine history. Scott eventually demonstrated that the code was a forgery committed by Marco.
When Scott presented these conclusions in his doctoral dissertation, defended on 16 June 1968 before a
panel of eminent Filipino historians which included Teodoro Agoncillo, Horacio de la Costa, Marcelino
Foronda, Mercedes Grau Santamaria, Nicolas Zafra and Gregorio Zaide, not a single question was raised
about the chapter which he had called The Contributions of Jose E. Marco to Philippine historiography.

William Henry Scott published his findings debunking the code in his book, Pre-hispanic Source
Materials for the Study of Philippine History. Scott recognized that the type script copies seemed to
carry the style and syntax based on 19 th century manuscript. Scott supposed that such a peculiarity in
the orthography can be traced to the publication of a number of editions of the same work being
produced. There was also an inconsistency in the phrasing of dates which were considered suspicious.
The Code of Kalantiaw is stated to have been existence since 150 and its popularized use in 1433. The
very questionable peculiarity in the account of Kalantiaw is that it finds itself being referred in an 1137
source in which Kalantiaw is built a fort in 1433. Quite suspiciously, the account also bears a Bisayan
alphabet (c.1543 as dated in the account) of whose orthography bears the modulation of guttural signs
and the shift from the use of K from C which is more of a hispanization rather than a Philippine syllabary.

The NHI admitted that Kalantiaw was a hoax in 1998 when Chief Justice Andres Narvasa, who
was about to receive the Kalantiaw Award, asked Malacañang to look into the matter. In 2005, the NHI,
under the leadership of Ambeth Ocampo, made their opinion official when they submitted a resolution
to President Arroyo to revoke the national shrine status of the Kalantiaw Shrine in Aklan. The National
Historical Institute (NHI) Resolution No. 12 of 2004, declared that Code of Kalantiaw has no valid
Historical Basis. The NHI stated that the official affirmation that the Kalantiaw Code is a twentieth-
century fraudulent work by Jose Marco.
 Scott, William Henry (1984) [first published 1968]. Prehispanic Source Materials for the Study of
Philippine History.

Scott, William Henry (1992). "Kalantiaw: The Code That Never Was". Looking for the Prehispanic
Filipino and Other Essays in Philippine History and Other Essays in Philippine History.