The Malays - A People of Fascinating
Divisions
By John Tiffany
References to "the Malay" no doubt conjure mental impressions of a
people long particular to Indonesia and its surrounding areas. But
Malay bloodlines run strong from the Philippines to Madagascar.
They constitute possibly the worlds most culturally and
linguistically fractioned subrace.
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The Malay people might reasonably be called "the Vikings of the
Orient." Magnificent instinctive shipbuilders, renowned as among
the worlds finest sailors, they take to the water like fish, and
conquered a goodly portion of the globe before being themselves
"discovered" by Europeans. Indeed, they crossed the Indian Ocean to
discover and settle the island of Madagascar at a time when
Europeans, by and large, were still steering fearfully clear of the
open ocean.
Mighty mariners and master traders, many of these seafaring tribes
possess the amazing art of psycho-navigation, finding their way
through the vast oceans by a sort of sixth sense.
At one time, when Europeans were sailing around in small, clumsy
caravels, the Malays possessed the largest ships on the planet.
Even today, the great Malay ships known as prahus (or praus) may be
seen scything through the seas, the largest working sailing ships
left in the world. They are shaped like the galleons of dreams,
streaming softly into port under thousands of feet of black canvas.
(Blair, Lawrence, Ring of Fire: Exploring the Last Remote Places of
the World.)
Associated with the Malayo-Polynesian, or as it is nowadays called,
the Austronesian civilization, are mysterious mega liths and more
than one remarkable script of unknown, but certainly considerable
antiquity.
Like the Vikings, the Malays comprise one of the great seafaring
civilizations and spread their culture, language and racial stock
all over two vast oceans and three or four continents. Yet there
are also significant differences. The Malays have always disliked
land interiors, settling generally along coastlines and avoiding
the highlands. The Vikings, in contrast, penetrated deeply into
Russia, traveling overland and by rivers and inland seas as far as
Persia.
In a way the Malays could be described as less "mature" than the
Germanic peoples, in that they are quick to laugh, quick to anger,
and generally take life less seriously. They have been accused of
being hard to hold to their word, and of failing to recognize the
value of private property rights. And they are also unusual in
their reluctance to form a true nation; their loyalties have as a
rule been confined to their family, their tribe, and their
locality. Even when they have formed "empires" in the past, these
have not been states in the modern sense so much as city-states to
which outlying territories might render tribute, but rarely allowed
the "capital" to interfere in local affairs.
The fascinating part of the globe which we may call "the Malay
world" has touched America more than most people are aware.
Christopher Colum bus was sailing in search of the Spice Islands,
it is generally believed, when he landed on Caribbean shores. And
England acquired Manhattan from the Dutch in a swap: Manhattan for
one of the chief islands from which cloves are obtained.
But the Malay world is infinitely more important relative to
prehistory and some schools of human evolution.
Java is the home of the so-called Java Man (originally labeled
Pithecanthropus erectus by scientists, but later reclassified as
Homo erectus). This is thought to be an extinct ape-man or man-ape,
using stone tools and dating from as long ago as one million years
B.C. to some 250,000 B.C.; in a time when great ice sheets a mile
or so in thickness still covered much of North America and
Northwestern Europe.
Controversy swirls around another fossil hominid, Solo Man, found
in central Java. Some scholars classify Solo Man as an intermediate
species dating from perhaps 250,000 years ago, and claim him as
evidence of a Southeast Asian evolutionary descent from H. erectus
to H. sapiens. Others insist Solo Man was simply an advanced race
of H. erectus who survived for a while in isolation, then died out
completely.
How a proto-human such as H. erectus wound up in such a seemingly
out-of-the-way place as Java is at first glance a mystery, as is
the presence of the orangutan on the island of Borneo, the land of
the singing fish (see MacDonald). And how did the negritos, the
Papuans and other primitive people arrive at these islands, if, as
is generally assumed, they originated on the mainland of Eurasia or
Africa? Conversely, if they had their start in the islands, how did
they get to the continents? These people seem to have neither the
knowledge nor the ability to build any sort of seaworthy vessel,
even a raft.
The likely explanation for how primitives got to such places as
Indonesia and Malaysia, the Philippines, New Guinea, Australia and
Madagascar becomes evident when we examine a map of the area during
the Pleistocene era. The surface of the ocean then was at todays
40 fathom line, and vast areas now submerged were then above water.
Indeed, it was possible to walk from the mainland of Asia to all of
Malaysia, including the island of Borneo (this entire area was one
landmass, called by geologists Sundaland), and to the Philippines,
and it appears that man followed in the footsteps of elephants,
rhinoceri and stegodons along this route.
All Southeast Asian H. sapiens fossils prior to about 5,000 B.C.
are of the type known as Bacson-Hoabinhians (because their culture
was first recognized from the provinces of Hoa-binh, Hoa-nan, and
Tan-hoa, in Vietnams Bacson mountains). The cave-dwelling
Hoabinhians have been identified as members of the Australoid
Veddoid group of peoples, who survive in isolated pockets in Malaya
and the Philippines today. (The Toalas of southern Celebes would be
examples of the Veddoid type.)
The Hoabinhians seem to have been of a commanding stature, six feet
or so tall, with heavy bones, and possessed of large skulls with
massive jaws and well-developed brow ridges. Their only known
products were crudely chipped hand axes that can only with some
difficulty be recognized as tools rather than naturally occurring
rocks. Their skeletons are remarkably similar to present- day
Melanesians, such as the people of New Caledonia and the Loyalty
Islands. It is therefore thought that Australoids were the original
"modern men" of this part of the globe, and that they were
absorbed, driven to the uplands or pushed eastward by waves of
Caucasoid and Mongoloid migration. These first modern men of the
area seem to have been cannibals, as crushed human bones are found
alongside discarded shells and debris of such prey animals as
tapirs, elephants, deer and rhinoceri.
The first human burials and partial cremations in the area date
from about 20,000 B.C. The first cave paintings in the region
(mainly hand stencils but also human and animal figures) may be
10,000 or more years old and come from southwestern Sulawesi and
New Guinea.
We know that the Malay region today contains races ranging from
such primitive forms of humanity as the dwarf negritos, the Papuans
and the Kubus, to the highly civilized Indian-Javanese, who more
than 600 years ago built such fabulous monuments as the Buddhist
Borobudur (Barabodur) and the Hindu chandi Prambanan. These jewels
of Oriental art are noted for their magnificent sculptures and
reliefs. It is a mystery why Hinduism was unable to disseminate
itself over vast territories as did Buddhism, its penetration being
limited to the Malay archipelago, Cambodia and Champa.
Nevertheless, it struck root there so deeply that, like Buddhism,
its influence has persisted down to the present day. (See Bosch for
an analysis of this puzzle.)
On the small island of Bali, separated from Java by a strait only
two miles wide, are found various relict groups, survivals of
earlier times. First there are the majority of Balinese, who are
Hin dus. In ancient times, Java was Hindu, but it was taken over by
Mos lems. In Bali, Islam seems never to have achieved a
foothold.
At one time Bali was populated by a race referred to by Covarrubias
(Island of Bali) as "pure Indonesians", the Bali Aga. These people
still have their own villages, from which outsiders, including
other Balinese, are rigid ly excluded.
The negritos or Semang, although believed to be more recent
arrivals than the Australoids and closely related Veddoids, are the
most primitive race in Southeast Asia and the Malay Archipelago.
These small and black woolly-headed nomads are of the same stock as
the Aetas of the Phil ip pines and the Min copies of the Andaman
Islands. They build neither houses nor boats but sleep around an
open fire under a leafy shelter propped up by a stick.
Living in family groups with no tribal organization, they fear
thunder and lightning and draw blood from their shins to appease
the unseen powers that cause them. For their food they depend on
what they can gather or kill with their blowguns and poison arrows.
The negritos speak Mon-Khmer-related languages. These tongues
belong to the Austro asiatic language family, not to be confused
with the Austronesian language family which includes the other
indigenous languages of modern Malaysia, in cluding Malay. It is
believed the Aus tro asiatic language family was once found over
the whole of the southern Indo chinese mainland.
Both the negritos and the Melanesians are believed to be of
basically Australoid inheritance. Despite some marked resemblances,
such as short stature, dark skin and kinky hair, the African
pygmies (the only pure- blooded Negroes) and the Asian-Oce anic
negritos have different origins, and their similarities are
probably the reflection of adaptation to similar environmental
conditions. (See Bellwood.) The negritos appear to have evolved in
situ from their more typically Australoid ancestors, over a period
of tens of thousands of years, possibly having lost contact with
related population groups when the water level rose at the end of
the last ice age. Genetic studies indicate that the Luzon and
Mindanao negritos have probably been separated from each other for
at least 10,000 years.
Far higher on the scale of evolution are the taller, fair-skinned,
wavy-haired semi-nomadic Sakai or Senoi of the mountains and
foothills of Malaysia. They are a cinnamon-colored people of
"Indonesian" racial stock, but their language, interestingly
enough, is mainly Mon-Annam or (AKA) Mon-Khmer.
In the southern half of Malaysia are found primitive tribes whose
"proto-Malay" (AKA Austronesian or Malayo-Polynesian) ancestors
trekked down, according to one theory, from what is now Yunnan and
overran Indochina. These Jakun, as they call themselves, speak a
pure form of Malay, unmixed with Sanskrit and other foreign loan
words, but racially some of them have absorbed so much
Australo-Melanesoid blood that they cannot readily be distinguished
from Papuans, being big, black and bearded.
The Encyclopedia Britannica (Volume 17, London and New York) states
that Madagascars natives, collectively known as Malagasy, "are
divided into a considerable number of tribes, each having its
distinct customs." Although geographically an African island on the
Indian Ocean, the Encyclopedia notes that "the majority of its
inhabitants are derived, the lighter portion of them from the
Malayo-Polynesian stock, and the darker races from the Melanesian.
This is inferred from their similarity to the peoples of the Indian
and Pacific archipelagoes in their physical appearance, mental
habits, customs and, above all, in their language. The Negroid
influence is derived from slaves brought from nearby Africa by Arab
traders. Whereas indigenous Malays traveled 2,000 miles in
countless voyages to first discover and then colonize Madagascar,
Negroes could not navigate 200 miles from Africa.
Madagascar is 800 miles long and about 200 miles wide at one point.
Unlike most Malay concentrations, the Encyclopedia states that The
most striking proof of the virtual unity of the inhabitants of
Madagascar is that substantially but one language is spoken over
the whole country. The Malay origin of the Malagasy were noted by
Westerners in the 16th century. The Malagasy never devised a
written language (consequently producing no manuscripts or
inscriptions). Their language was eventually reduced to writing by
English missionaries.
Madagascar remains a temperate, tranquil and rather idyllic place,
underpopulated by elements not particularly interested in the chaos
of the outside world. Even today, some wonder: What if the "final
solution" plan devised by the Polish government in the late 1930s
and cribbed by the Germans (to create a state for Europes Jews on
Madagascar) had not been bashed to smithereens by World War II?
Would not a terrible and bloody burden have been averted; the
postwar creation of that Jewish state in Palestine?
The proto-Malays are shorter and darker than the "Malays proper"
and are believed to have been a mixture of Caucasoid and Mongoloid
peoples, while a later wave of Malays, called the "deutero-Malays",
were entirely Mongoloid. The American anthropologist H. Otley
Beyer, who lived in the Philippines most of his life, believed
these two waves occurred something like 5,000 and 3,500 years B.C.,
respectively.
Another theory is that the Malays did not come from mainland Asia,
but originated in the Minangkabau area, where they are still found
today. The Minang kabau or Minang people are known as the most
advanced and educated in Indonesia, living in their saddle-roofed
traditional houses, set on stilts, with palm-fiber roofs and walls
covered in ornate carvings, like the Torajas of the highlands of
Celebes. They are matrilineal, with property and power passing from
mother to daughter.
The proto-Malays are the ancestors of the Ibans and most of the
Dayaks of Borneo (Dyaks, AKA Land Dayaks, to distinguish them from
the Ibans, who are sometimes called the Sea Dayaks). The
proto-Malay type also survives in the Bataks of Sumatra, the
islanders of Nias, and the Torajas, noted for their ship- shaped
houses and their strange burial rites (the bodies are placed in
niches cut into the faces of vertical cliffs, where tau-tau
effigies of the dead are erected to stare out at the living). The
Torajas still erect megaliths and have a most unusual form of
writing in which each letter looks like a mandala or posy. (The
Buginese also have an ancient, i.e., pre-Hindu, script, in which,
it is said, each letter resembles the cross section of a different
spiral seashell.)
We also find proto-Malays today in the Igorot and Ifugao of
northern Luzon. They tend to be frank and open people and are
excellent farmers. They probably represent the primitive Malay
type, little affected by foreign influences.
The nomadic Punan (or Penan) Dyaks of central Borneo, a fascinating
subtribe of non-headhunters, are, in terms of their racial
appearance, as purely Mongoloid as any people on earth. The lovely,
topless young maidens of this lost tribe, whose very existence
is denied by the Indonesian government, perform a kind of water
music by slapping their cupped hands against the surface of a
nameless, uncharted river. A kind of Borneo bluegrass is also
played after dark on the nose flute and two strange stringed
instruments, the satung and the sapeh.
The Punans find their way through the dense jungles of Borneo by
psycho-navigation, like the Australian aborigines, the Dinka of the
Sahara and the Bugis seafaring tribes. They are re nowned as the
finest weavers of rattan in the world and are noted for their
beads, of astonishing age and variety, including beads identical to
those extracted from Mesopotamian graves 2,300 years old. Little is
known of the Punans religion, save that they worship Aping, the
forest god.
The deep jungle natives of Borneo include not only the Punans, but
the Muruts (who speak several different languages), and various
other peoples. In Sabah, there are the Muruts and the Kadazan
(formerly called the Dusun). The Kadazan, like the Muruts, speak
several different languages. These Mon go loid tribes look very
much alike to the untrained eye, but each has its own
characteristic social organization and customs. To some extent they
have influenced one another since emigrating to the island, but
many differences still distinguish their various groups. In
particular, they have not evolved a common language, although they
have lived for ages as neighbors on the same rivers. They speak a
multiplicity of unconnected tongues, each incomprehensible to the
next-door communities upstream or downstream (see MacDonald).
Coates disputes the theory of a Chi nese origin for the prehistoric
Aus tro nesian or proto-Malay civilization (also called the Pacific
or Oceanic civilization). He argues that it is of Pacific origin,
perhaps having its starting point in the Gilbert Islands,
approximately 4,500 miles east of Java (Islands of the South, by
Austin Coates). Whatever the origin of the Austronesian culture, a
key fact is that these Caucasoid Malayo-Polynesian people, at their
height, spanned the globe from Tahiti and perhaps Easter Island to
Madagascar. (An Indonesian group of tribes in Madagascar is
believed to be descended from settlers from the Sulu
Islands.)
Unfortunately, because of the presence of a large mass of
incompatible Mela nesians in their center, who were regarded and
treated by the majority of Malays as an inferior and unmarriageable
people, the Malay- Polynesians became split into an eastern
civilization, the Poly nesians, and a western civilization, the
Malays and Indonesians, each of which lost all knowledge of their
other half.
The difference between the continental mind and the Austro nesian
mind is illustrated by this contrast: Water, in the form of the
endless ocean to the west, was the major obstacle for European
explorers in their discovery of the New World. But the Gilbert
Islanders have an oral history telling of their own discovery of
South America in the distant past. On sighting the Andes after an
ocean voyage of four months, they were far from pleased, and
according to legend, turned around and sailed in disgust back
toward their native atolls. They described South America as
Maiwa, the wall at the side of the world, four moons sail to the
eastward, a land which stretches to the north and to the south
without end: beyond the furthest eastward island it lies, a wall
of mountains up against the sun. To these islanders, a continent
was an obstacle; to Westerners, an ocean was the obstacle.
The prehistoric Austronesian civilization included the island of
Ceylon in the west and the Philippines in the east. Today the
Filipinos are considerably sinified, some Filipinos being racially
almost indistinguishable from the Chinese. Ceylon (now Sri Lanka)
has been even more heavily indianized, and shows no surviving
traces of any Malayo-Poly nesian speech. Yet in both these areas
much of the Austronesian lifestyle and manner have survived.
The Philippines are the home of eight different civilized
peoples, sometimes referred to as tribes. There are the Visayans,
Tagalogs, Ilocanos, Bicols, Pangasinans, Pampangans, Cagayans and
the Zambalans. However, the loose use of the word tribes to
designate these peoples is very misleading. The truth is that they
are the descendants of originally distinct tribes or peoples which
have gradually come to resemble each other. There is a marked
tendency of the Tagalogs and the Visayans to impose their will on
the others. The actual differences between a Tagalog and a Visayan
are not great, from an American point of view, but the Tagalogs and
Visayans consider them to be considerable.
Oddly as it may seem, there are more sharply distinct dialects
spoken in the Philippines than there are peoples. The Visayans, for
example, are split three ways among speakers of Cebuano, Ilongo and
Cuyuno.
Some Filipinos have wanted to alter their racial stocks by an
infusion of white blood. Juan Araneta, a very intelligent Visayan
of Negro ancestry, stated around the turn of the 20th century that
white blood is the only hope for his people, that if he had his way
he would jail every American soldier who did not leave at least
three children behind him.
Besides the civilized peoples, there are also the Ifugao, the
Igorot, the Manobo, and the Bukidnon, and the wild Tingians of
Apayao, who proved the most difficult of the hill tribes of
northern Luzon to bring under effective governmental control.
There, as in Borneo, headhunting is connected with religious
beliefs and observances. As recently as 1967, there were massive
genocidally-flavored outbreaks of headhunting and cannibalism by
the Dayaks of Borneo.
There is little racial difference be tween southern India and
Ceylon, but culturally they are worlds apart. As Coates notes: The
faces on either side of the Palk Strait [separating India from
Ceylon] look the same, but whereas in South India they were
mournful and solemn, in Ceylon they are cheerful and one hears
laughter. It is an entirely different and more relaxed atmosphere,
itself a subtle reminder of the Austro nesian character, which
everywhere left its imprint.
Austronesia, as a culture, formerly extended deeply into Southern
Asia, including the Indochinese peninsula, much of southern China
and northeastern India. The enlargement and expansion of the
continental civilizations of the Orient, and in particular the
southward expansion of the Chinese culture (which in turn caused
large numbers of adjacent peoples, such as Burmese, Thais and
Vietnamese to move south into Indochina) had the effect of
submerging the Austronesian culture there. Some of the tribal
peoples in Burma, southern China and northeastern India, such as
the Nagas, represent remote surviving enclaves of Austronesian
influence.
The relationship between the Malay and Polynesian languages is not
disputed. Certain Moi dialects in southern Annam are also related
to this language family. Even the Mundas of Chota Nagpur in India
present rather striking likenesses to the pre-Malays and the
Mois.
Records of actual events in Singapore do not appear until about the
14th century A.D. By this time the island was a small but
flourishing center of trade. It had acquired the name, of unknown
derivation, of Temasek, which has been interpreted by some as
meaning Sea Town and by others as meaning Place of Festivals.
The name Singapore, or Sing a pura, was later bestowed upon Tem a
sek by the Hindus. But Swetten ham argues that Temasek is not a
Malay term at all, and is itself of very ancient South Indian
origin. Singa is Sanskrit for lion and pura for town.
Megalithic monuments are known from the southern Malay peninsula
and northern Borneo, as well as in some other locations in the
Malay world. One of those places is Sumba, an island south of
Komodo, which is the home of the famous dragons (actually giant,
carnivorous lizards). These megaliths are still raised to honor the
dead.
Throughout the Malay archipelago, the sea serves as a link with
other peoples. The larger islands have many sizable rivers which
are navigable by ship and in places cut through thick jungle which
would otherwise be inaccessible, making sea transport essential to
the life of the people. The decoration of boats is a cultural
necessity, and the decorations are connected with the peoples
concepts of the cosmic system. Great care is devoted to their
execution, and among them are found examples of the highest
artistic skill.
Over the centuries the Malay peninsula area developed into a
conglomeration of small sovereign Malay states which proved too
weak to resist the encroachments of a succession of outside
imperialistic powers. They fell under the empires based in Sumatra,
Java or Siam. Not until the century did the indigenous people
succeed in gaining control of their own destiny. For a few glorious
decades, the whole peninsula formed part of a great Malay empire,
with its center in the fortified city of Malice (Malacca).
Malacca was founded by the piratical Hindu prince called
Parameswara (mean ing prince consort). He had been forced to flee
from Palembang in his native Sumatra in 1377 (when his father-
in-law, who ruled the empire of Maj Apahit, Java, destroyed the
city for declaring independence) to Old Singa pore, which was then
known as Tuma sek. After only eight days in Tumasek, Parameswara
had the local ruler, his host, killed, and took control of the
city. This ruler had been the son-in-law of the king of Siam, who
ordered the ruler of Patani to punish Parameswara by destroying
Singapore.
Parameswara was, in turn, forced to flee from Singapore and wound
up at Malacca after an undetermined period in Muar. By cleverly
converting to Islam and marrying the daughter of the sultan of
Pasai about 1414, Parameswara (who now took on the title of Megat
Iskandar Shah) was able to make his new town of Malacca the great
trading center he wished it to be.
Malacca was destined to become the center from which Islam spread
throughout the region. The religion was brought there from northern
Sumatra (the states of Pasai and Perlak), where it had been
established by traders from India, mostly by Gujerati merchants
from the northwest of India, although a convincing case has been
made for Islam first having been introduced into Sumatra by
merchants from the Coromandel coast. The Hikayat Raja Pasai states
that Islam came from south India.
The fact that Islam was brought to this heavily Hinduized region by
Indians rather than by Arabs was key to the rapid and peaceful
spread of the new religion, as the Moslem Indians did not seek to
change traditional customs very much. By about 1414, there was a
fairly numerous Moslem trading community in the city. Malacca
itself was now firmly established, with the support and protection
of the Ming emperors of China, who were useful allies against the
Siamese.
During the 15th century Malacca rose to become, in the words of
Tome Pires, the 16th century Portuguese apothecary and historian,
of such importance and profit that it seems to me it has no equal
in the world. Although building upon an illustrious past, these
were the glory days of the Malay people, in which were established
a pattern of government and a lifestyle which was emulated by
subsequent Malay kingdoms and became the basis of what was later
termed traditional Malay culture and statecraft.
For all its glory, however, Malacca never really succeeded in
making the Malay straits its private lake. The northern Malay
states of Patani, Kelantan, Trengganu and Kedah continued for a
long time to acknowledge the overlordship of Ayudhya (Thailand),
and only toward the end of the 15th century was Malaccas influence
really felt there. Even on the opposite side of the strait, Pasai
continued as an independent port able to satisfy foreign traders,
and Aur too continued to retain its autonomy.
Amok, the "Malay malaise", is one of the few Malay words to enter
into the English language, along with ketchup (catsup). The Malays
are a very sensitive people, easily offended, with a tendency to
contain their anger and hold a grudge. A person who ran amok would
be a typical Malay man who broods over a real or fancied affront
until he becomes enraged, running through the streets of his
village slashing anyone within reach with a machete-like
instrument.
In racial terms Indonesias population, consisting of hundreds of
tribes and ethnic groups, is basically of Malay stock. There are at
least 14 major ethnic groups in Indonesia: Atjehnese, Batak, Minan
g kabau, Coastal Malay, Sundanese, Java nese, Madurese, Balinese,
Dyaks, Makas sarese, Buginese, Torajas, Menandonese, Ambonese, and
perhaps a few others. We must not forget the East Timorese, victims
of an anti-Christian holocaust starting in 1975. Isolated fighting
still continues in East Timor. It remains a very sensitive topic
politically. East Timor has been closed to tourists by the
Indonesian government.
Each ethnic group in Indonesia occupies its own region, speaks its
own language and possesses its own forms of social organization.
These communities have a sense of distinctness and a local pride
that tend in some circumstances to take precedence over feelings of
loyalty to the nation (more accurately described as an empire) of
Indonesia. Java, of course, has more than half the population of
the entire empire, making the ethnic distribution of power quite a
lopsided one.
Recent excavations at two sites in northern Thailand have revealed
that a metal-using culture was under way there in the fourth
millennium B.C.much earlier than in either China or India. This
discovery has overturned the conception of Southeast Asia as a
backwater of prehistory, and some experts now speculate that the
area was in fact one of the cradles of human cultural development.
Archeology has uncovered numerous sites in present-day Kedah which
may one day reveal the existence of an important center of
civilization in northern Malaya and southern Thailand, according to
Ryan. The Malay peninsulas most important relics of the bronze
age, oddly enough, are two kettledrumsone was revealed by a flood
in Pahang, and the other was dug up in Selangor by the Japanese in
1944.
Of Thailand (whose name means Land of the Free), it is
interesting to note that the Thais themselves are relative
newcomers to what we now call Thailand, having arrived there from
China only about 1,000 years ago. The older name for the country,
Siam, etymologically means dark brown people, evidently a
reference to the difference in skin color by a lighter colored
people. Whether this term was first employed by the natives to
describe the Thai invaders or vice versa remains
problematical.
Fossils of H. sapiens have been found in China and mainland
Southeast Asia dating from as early as 60,000 B.C. This compares
favorably with the ap pear ance of modern man in other parts of the
world, although two imprecisely dated African fossils are said to
be more than 90,000 years old. (One theory, as yet neither proved
nor disproved, is that modern man could have evolved separately in
different regions.) Modern man is known to have inhabited
Indonesia, New Guinea and Aus tralia about 40,000 years ago, and
possibly earlier.
The empire of Srivajaya (Shrivajaya) in south Sumatra was, from the
second half of the seventh to the 13th century A.D., the greatest
of the Indonesian sea powers, after Java. Some of the major
classical kingdoms and Islamic principalities were Malacca in the
north, Melayu and Srivijaya in Sumatra, and Minangkabau on the west
coast
In the 13th century, Marco Polo and Rustichello wrote of the
numerous Malay kingdoms of the time, which Polo visited after
departing from Japan: Chamba; Java; Lokak; the island of Malayur;
Lesser Java with at least eight kingdoms including Ferlec and
Basman (where they had wild elephants and unicorns as big as the
elephants), the kingdom of Sumatra, Dagroian, Lambri and Fansur.
He also visited the mysterious island of Gauenispola, and the
Nicobar and Andaman islands, before moving on to Ceylon. Back in
Europe, Polo was scorned for his tall tales of people actually
eating the nests of birds, which they boiled over fires of burning
black stones. Centuries would elapse before the same black stones
would be discovered in Europe, where they would fuel the Industrial
Revolution.
The Bugis from the Celebes Islands (especially the port of
Macassar) were (and still are) renowned as excellent sailors and
mercenary soldiers. They were hired as mercenaries by Sultan Ibra
him of Johore in the late 17th century. But once having visited the
peninsula, the ferocious Bugis proved hard to get rid of, and were
a rising influence throughout the 18th century, despite the very
real fear of the fierce Bugis pirates.
It must be noted that once the Dutch gained power in the region,
they could not allow a port such as Macassar to compete with them.
They conquered it in the 17th century and ruined its trade. This is
what forced the Bugis to take up the occupation of piracy. They had
learned to use guns and body armor from the Portuguese, and many a
South east Asian ruler called on them for help in war.
The most complicated galleys de signed outside the Mediter ranean
were Malay. Indeed, while most of their oared craft were single
banked, one trireme that was sketched about 1767 had a hull about
105 feet long and 16 feet wide, with double outriggers projecting
about 26 feet. There were 25 rowers in each bank and, for added
zip, 18 more paddlers on each outrigger.
The Malay pirates were renowned seamen whose skill, daring and just
plain lust for blood were the equal of anyone who ever raised the
Jolly Roger. Even today, the great Bugis prahus may be seen
scything through the seas, the largest working sailing ships left
in the world, shaped like the galleons of dreams, streaming softly
into port under thousands of feet of black canvas. F
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Source: The Barnes Review, 2(4) 1996 , pp. 3-10.
