Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has reintroduced one of the world’s greatest epics to a global audience. Nearly three thousand years after Homer composed the tale, millions of people continue to be captivated by Odysseus’ long and perilous voyage home from the Trojan War.
Like every enduring classic, the story speaks to universal human concerns: courage, temptation, suffering and the longing to return home. Yet watching Nolan’s film also prompted another question: why do some civilisational epics become part of humanity’s common imagination while others, no less remarkable, remain largely unknown beyond their place of origin?
For me, that forgotten epic is I La Galigo.
Born into the Bugis-Makassar cultural tradition of South Sulawesi, I could not watch The Odyssey without recalling the monumental work that has shaped my own understanding of the sea. This is not an attempt to diminish Homer’s achievement or to claim that one civilisation’s masterpiece is superior to another’s.
Rather, Nolan’s film offers an opportunity to broaden our understanding of humanity’s literary inheritance. If the Odyssey reveals how the ancient Greeks imagined the relationship between human beings, power and the sea, I La Galigo offers a strikingly different maritime imagination, one that emerged independently in the Indonesian archipelago and remains profoundly relevant today.
The contrast begins with their heroes.
Odysseus is a warrior trying to return to what he has lost. His voyage is one of survival. Every stretch of water threatens catastrophe. The sea separates him from home, confronts him with monsters, storms and divine punishment, and repeatedly frustrates his determination to reach Ithaca. One of the most memorable moments in Nolan’s film, as in Homer’s epic, shows him tied tightly to the mast of his ship while his crew seals their ears against the irresistible song of the Sirens. To survive, Odysseus must restrain himself, endure temptation and outwit the forces of nature.
Sawerigading, the hero of I La Galigo, embarks on a very different journey.
His voyage begins not in war but in an impossible moral dilemma. Forbidden from marrying his twin sister, We Tenriabeng, he is persuaded to seek another woman whose beauty mirrors hers: We Cudai, princess of the distant Kingdom of Cina.
Reaching her requires a voyage across seas never before crossed. To undertake that journey, Sawerigading orders the felling of the sacred Welenreng tree, from which a magnificent vessel is constructed. The ship is not only a means of transport. It symbolises the convergence of craftsmanship, political authority, cosmology and humanity’s relationship with the natural world.
Unlike Odysseus, Sawerigading does not sail simply to survive. He sails to create something new. His voyage is one of diplomacy, encounter and the forging of new relationships across the seas. The ocean is not a hostile frontier separating civilisation from safety. It is the very space through which civilisation expands. Across the epic, kingdoms are connected by maritime routes, alliances are forged through travel, and political communities emerge through movement rather than isolation. The sea is not an obstacle to history but the medium through which history unfolds.
This distinction reflects two different ways of imagining the world. In the Homeric tradition, the sea is an unpredictable force that tests human endurance. In I La Galigo, the sea is home, a living space that sustains commerce, kinship and cultural exchange.
It is no coincidence that the Bugis and Makassar peoples would become among the greatest seafarers in Southeast Asia, navigating monsoon winds across the archipelago and far beyond. Their epic did not simply celebrate maritime life. It emerged from it.
That worldview is distilled in one of the most enduring Makassar maxims: Kuallengi tallanga na towalia, or, “I choose to sink rather than turn back.” The saying is often interpreted as a declaration of courage, but it expresses something deeper. It reflects the conviction that honour lies in fulfilling one’s responsibility despite uncertainty. To retreat out of fear is a greater failure than to face the sea with dignity intact. It is an ethic born not from conquering the ocean but from recognising that human life is inseparable from it.
It is this maritime philosophy, rather than the plot alone, that makes I La Galigo one of the world’s most remarkable epics. Yet even in Indonesia not many people have ever heard of it, let alone outside Indonesia. That absence tells us as much about the way global intellectual history has been written as it does about the epic itself.
Every civilisation preserves its deepest values through monumental texts. The Torah codified sacred law for ancient Israel. The Mahabharata explored kingship, justice and moral duty across the Indian subcontinent. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey became the literary foundations of the Greek world. The Bible and the Quran transformed religious, philosophical and legal traditions across continents. These works are more than literary masterpieces; they are repositories of civilisational memory, preserving how societies understood authority, morality, humanity and the cosmos.
I La Galigo belongs within this global conversation.
Composed between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries through an extraordinarily sophisticated oral tradition before being recorded in the Bugis Lontara script, the epic spans some 300,000 lines, making it widely recognised as the longest literary epic in the world. More importantly, it is the collective achievement of an entire civilisation rather than the work of a single author. Its surviving manuscripts have been recognised by UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register, affirming their importance not only to Indonesia but to humanity’s documentary heritage.
The significance of I La Galigo, however, lies not in its extraordinary length but in what it reveals. Embedded within its verses are sophisticated understandings of political authority, kinship, customary law, diplomacy, navigation and cosmology. It demonstrates that long before the modern nation-state, and long before colonialism reordered the intellectual landscape of Southeast Asia, societies in the Indonesian archipelago possessed the capacity to generate complex systems of knowledge rooted in their own historical and ecological experience.
This does not mean that the Bugis-Makassar civilisation developed in isolation. Like every great civilisation, it interacted with the wider world, absorbing and reshaping external influences. Yet I La Galigo reminds us that Southeast Asia was never just a passive recipient of ideas originating elsewhere. It was also a producer of ideas, literature and philosophies that deserve a place within the global history of civilisation.
That historical reminder feels especially urgent today.
Indonesia proudly describes itself as the world’s largest archipelagic nation, yet its development often reflects a strikingly continental mindset. The sea is increasingly treated as territory to reclaim, a source of raw materials to extract or a shipping corridor connecting centres of economic growth. Coastal reclamation, marine sand extraction and the steady degradation of marine ecosystems reveal a relationship with the ocean driven more by immediate economic calculation than by long-term stewardship.
The irony is profound. The civilisation that produced one of humanity’s greatest maritime epics now risks forgetting the very worldview that made such an achievement possible. The issue is not simply environmental; it is intellectual. Too often, Indonesia looks abroad for concepts, development models and policy frameworks while neglecting the knowledge embedded in its own historical traditions. Learning from others is essential for every society. But genuine confidence comes not from imitation alone. It also comes from recognising that one’s own civilisation has contributed something distinctive to humanity’s shared understanding of the world.
That is why I La Galigo deserves to be read not as a relic of the past but as a living intellectual resource. It does not offer ready-made solutions to climate change or coastal degradation, nor should it be romanticised as an ideal blueprint for modern governance. Its enduring value lies elsewhere. It reminds us that another way of imagining the relationship between humanity and the sea has long existed in this archipelago, one grounded not in conquest or extraction but in reciprocity, responsibility and connection.
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey reminds us why Homer’s epic continues to inspire audiences around the world. It should also encourage us to ask what other stories deserve to stand beside it. Recognising I La Galigo as one of humanity’s great civilisational texts is not an exercise in cultural nationalism, nor is it an attempt to challenge the place of the Odyssey within world literature. It is an invitation to widen the global canon and to acknowledge that humanity has always possessed multiple centres of intellectual creativity.
For Indonesia, that recognition carries an additional responsibility. Recovering I La Galigo is not simply about celebrating an ancient manuscript. It is about recovering the confidence to think from our own historical experience while engaging openly with the world. At a time when climate change is redefining humanity’s relationship with the oceans, the wisdom preserved in this remarkable epic reminds us that the sea is not merely a resource to exploit or a barrier to overcome. For an archipelagic nation, it is the space through which civilisation itself is sustained.
Perhaps that is the deeper lesson hidden behind the global spectacle of Nolan’s The Odyssey. While the world rediscovers the voyage of Odysseus, Indonesia has an opportunity to rediscover the voyage of Sawerigading, not to prove that one hero was greater than the other, but to remember that our own maritime civilisation also produced ideas worthy of joining humanity’s greatest conversations.
The editorial is written by Abdul Khalik, the editor-in-chief of Omong-Omong Media.
