JMBRAS, JUNE 2020 VOL 93 PART 1, NUMBER 318, pp. 1–22 Sovereign Signs: Titles of Kingship on Malay Seals Annabel Teh Gallop Abstract The recent publication of a new catalogue of over 2,000 Malay seals—defned as seals from Southeast Asia, with inscriptions in Arabic script—makes available for the frst time a substantial corpus of primary source material from the Malay archipelago, dating from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century. The main function of the inscription on a Malay seal was to identify the seal owner and to locate him or her within their social, political and spiritual universe. This was evoked through an iteration of his/her title and/or personal name, sometimes accompanied by a pedigree, a place name, a date, a religious expression, and an amuletic formula imbued with protective powers. In this article the titles of Malay kingship inscribed on seals will be explored through the various component elements: the prefatory honorifcs, the title proper of the ruler, and the sovereign epithets used to confrm and magnify his status. Keywords Malay seals, sigillography, Malay world, sovereignty, Malay titles, caliphal titles, Islam, kingship The Author Annabel Teh Gallop is head of the Southeast Asia section at the British Library, London. She works on Malay and Indonesian manuscripts, documents, leters and seals, and the art of the Qur’an in Southeast Asia. Her most recent publication is Malay Seals from the Islamic World of Southeast Asia: Content, Form, Context, Catalogue (Singapore: NUS Press in association with the British Library, 2019). E-mail: annabel.gallop@bl.uk