must be critically evaluated before they are judged as evidence of direct contacts." Jocano lists the various streams of the evidence which support the assertion that this influence reached the Philippines include:"Syllabic writing; artifacts in the form of different figurines made of clay, gold, and bronze that were dug in various sites in the Philippines; and 336 loanwords identified by Professor Francisco to be Sanskrit in origin, with 150 of them identified as the origin of some major Philippine terms." The Agusan image One major artifact often presented as physical evidence of early Indian influence in the Philippines is the "golden image of Agusan" artifact, a 1.79 kilogram, 21 carat Mataram-period gold image discovered by a Manobo woman named Bilay Campos in Esperanza, Agusan in 1918. H. Otley Beyer interpreted the image as that of a Sivaite goddess, but with the religiously important hand signals improperly copied by local (probably Mindanao) workmen. Thus it suggests that Hinduism was already in the Philippines before Magellan arrived, but also suggests that the early Filipinos had an imperfect version of Hinduism which they got from the Majapahit. The Laguna copperplate inscription Another artifact often presented as physical evidence of early Indonesian and Indian influence in the Philippines is the 10th century Laguna Copperplate Inscription (LCI), found in 1989 and deciphered in 1992 by Dutch anthropologist Antoon Postma, and famous as the earliest known written document found in the Philippines. The (LCI) was written in a variety of the Old Malay language, using the Old Kawi script, and contains numerous loanwords from Sanskrit and a few non-Malay vocabulary elements whose origin may be Old Javanese. The use of Sanskrit loanwords is considered evidence of Indian cultural influences on the cultures of the Malay Archipelago, which in turn had close trade and cultural ties with early Philippine polities, including those mentioned in the LCI. Sanskrit loanwords and scripts According to Jocano, a total of 336 loanwords were identified by Professor Juan R. Francisco to be Sanskrit in origin, "with 150 of them identified as the origin of some major Philippine terms." Many of these loanwords concerned governance and mythology, which were the particular concern of the Maginoo class, indicating a desire of members of that class to validate their status as rulers by associating themselves with foreign powers. Indian honorifics also influenced the Filipino honorifics. Examples of these include Raja, Rani, Maharlika, Datu, etc. which