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Arab, and in part—as with the line of princes who have now occupied the throne for more than a century and a half—of Bugis origin. The great literati or holy men were almost without exception foreigners, and the same is true of many of the rich traders and high officials. The Klings and Arabs settled in Acheh, nay even some of the slaves have after several generations become an integral part of the Achehnese people. From this it may be readily concluded that the four great tribes, while comprehending the whole of the Tunòng people, who owing to the nature of their environment were least of all exposed to foreign influence or admixture, never included all the Achehnese. This remains probable even in view of the indubitable fact that the tribal relations which did actually prevail, are in the lowlands fading away and gradually disappearing under the pressure of the superior power of the chiefs.
The slight information which we here furnish as to the four kawōms, their tradition and adat is from the nature of the subject merely preliminary, and will we hope be improved or better still completed by others.
All that can be gathered of the origin of the four kawōms or sukèës, even with respect to their names is thus to a hazardous degree mixed up with modern Achehnese philosophy and conjecture. These materials though they wear the outward appearance of having been handed down from distant ages, exhibit manifest traces of having been thought out in a period much too remote for accuracy from the origin of the tribes, or concocted to suit the real or supposed meanings of the names[1]. The very circumstance that these kawōm-legends diverge as widely as the poles should cause us to abandon as hopeless the search among them for "germs of history."
- ↑ See also Van Langen, Atjehsch Staatsbestuur pp. 387 et seq. The explanation there given of the distribution of the people into kawōms as based on difference of race, thus giving us a Mante-Batak, a Hindu and a half-caste kawōm, and also one of more recent origin, rests again on modern Achehnese theory and is as little trustworthy as the doctrine of Teungku Kutakarang (see p. 18 above) according to which the people of Acheh was composed of Arabs, Persians and Turks. The flights of fancy indulged in by the Achehnese expositors are shown by the explanation of the name of the kawōm Tōʾ Batèë on p. 388 of the above work. They derive it from the circumstance that on one occasion through the help of this tribe "stones enough" were found. In the first place, the proper meaning of tōʾ is "to arrive" and not "to be enough." Besides this, however, the word Tōʾ is a common abbreviation of Datōʾ which like Ja means ancestor, and as a matter of fact the tribe in question is just as often called Ja Batèë as Tōʾ Battèë.
