THE HISTORY OF THE CONSTITUTION DURING PRE-COLONIAL ERA The Philippines had long been served as an Asian trading port, which led to its colonization by the Spanish and then the Americans. The majority of the population was converted to Catholicism by the Spanish, and it is still the dominant religion in the country. Nationalist fervor began to rise among sections of Indios (as the Spanish referred to the Filipinos) during the latter part of the Spanish reign; fueled in large part by the writings of national hero Jose Rizal later killed by the Spanish government and other ilustrados the Filipino intellegensia. Filipinos frequently overlook the fact that the initial period of the country's literary history is the most extensive. Certain historical occurrences compelled lowland Filipinos to start counting the years of history from 1521, the first time written documents by Westerners referred to the archipelago that would later be known as "Las islas Filipinas." The discovery of the "Tabon Man" in a cave in Palawan in 1962, on the other hand, has allowed us to go back 50,000 years in time. The stages of ancient past demonstrate how early Filipinos gained mastery over their surroundings. Much can be reasonably deduced about pre-colonial Philippine literature from an analysis of collected oral tradition of Filipinos whose ancestors were able to retain their indigenous culture by living beyond the reach of Spanish colonial administrators, thanks to historical studies and writings. The pre-colonial Filipinos' oral literature reflected the community's values. The theme was typically the village's common experience—food collecting, creatures and objects of nature, work in the home, field, and forest, or sea, child care, and so on. The most frequent kinds of oral literature, such as the riddle, proverbs, and song, all seem to presume that the listener is familiar with the circumstances, actions, and objects addressed in the course of expressing an idea or emotion. Unless the piece was part of the community's cultural history, such as the epic, the language of oral literature was the language of everyday life. Precolonial poetry was made up of poems written in a variety of island tongues. Such poetry was discovered by the early Spanish immigrants, who duplicated it and reported it in their reports and letters to Spain. Although precolonial poetry are unique from folksong lyrics, they were often sung when recited, as is currently the case with all Asiatic peoples and Pacific Ocean tribes. Many precolonial poems are rudimentary in ideology and phraseology when viewed through the lens of our current advanced understanding of what poetry should be. Given that early Filipinos had never studied literature or had the opportunity to study poetry or poetic technique, it is astonishing that their spontaneous poetic expression had some rhythmic structure in the usage of equal syllabic counts for stanza lines and a clearly consistent rhyming scheme. Spanish missionaries writing grammars and vocabularies had made good use of these early beginnings of Filipino poetry to illustrate word usage according to the dictionary and grammatical definitions they had cast. Reference: Constitution net: https://constitutionnet.org/country/constitutional-history-philippines American Historical Association: https://www.historians.org/about-aha-and-membership/aha-history-and-archives/gi-roundtableseries/pamphlets/em-24-what-lies-ahead-for-the-philippines-(1945)/when-did-philippine-history-begin
