Unlike Borobudur, the brick temples of the Muara Jambi are almost entirely lacking in reliefs depicting a story. However, this does not mean that the builders of the Muara Jambi were illiterate.

According to senior archaeologist Prof. Mundarjito, this is proven by the fact that the gold plates in the Gumpung Temple foundation contain Buddhist mantras written in an ancient script presumably from the 9th-10th century. Precisely because they were we