The talk focusses on the historical practices of a major civilisation: the people of Java in Indonesia. Between 500 and 1500 CE, the island hosted a sophisticated society in which accurate knowledge of the past was of paramount importance. For the premodern Javanese, the past was precarious: archival documents perished quickly in the island’s tropical climate, while historical traditions deviated from the primary sources and diverged from each other. The Javanese strived to record and remember a past that was always on the verge of slipping away from them. The Javanese case has major implications for our understanding of historical practices in general. It shows that the contingency of textual conditions, rather than cultural or ethnic determinism, is the force that shapes historical practice across the globe.