ANTIQUITIES OF POLYNESIA.

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BY THE REV. D. MACDONALD.

A letter in The Argus of 22nd August calls attention to a very desirable service that may be rendered to an interesting and important branch of science by explorers and others in New Guinea and the Pacific Islands keeping watch during their wanderings for anything in the shape of inscriptions, whether alphabetical or hieroglyphic on rocks bamboo tablets, or other material, and either purchasing the tablets and bringing them to the Melbourne or some other museum, or making carefully and on the spot fac-simile drawings or photographs of them. Visitors to the islands will find that this idea, if they take it up, will give them a large amount of innocent recreation, and may lead to some very important results. In prosecuting any matter of this kind, it is well to have a theory. The endeavour to verify one's theory leads to tho collection of facts, and the facts may be permanently useful, even if the theory has to be discarded. Now, the most probable theory, in the writer's estimation, is that the Polynesian race came originally from the Persian Gulf, in very ancient times, when the head of that gulf was tho central point or heart of the world's civilisation, then in the hands of a Shemitic speaking people, who, for the purposes of this investigation, may be regarded as having planted the commercial civilisation of the Sabæans in South Arabia, and as having been one with the Sabæans. In the hands of these people, from prehistoric times to shortly before the Christian era, was the whole ship trade of the Indian Ocean; all the products of the East carried by sea to the West passed through the hands of these Chaldæo Sabæans. Moreover, and still for the purposes of this theory, they may be regarded as originally identical with the Phœnicians, as it is well known that the Phœnicians originally lived in tho Persian Gulf. It was there they became a seafaring people, it seems. It was from there they eventually (that is some of them) emigrated to that part of the shore of the Mediterranean to which they gave then name. According, then, to this theory the Polynesian family of speech is a branch of the Shemitic, and any engravings or representations alphabetic or symbolic, found in Polynesia or Oceania are likely to be Chaldæo-Phœnician.

"In the Philippines, at the arrival of the Spaniards, the art of writing was known, and Orientalists may see in the alphabets of that epoch that there is not in them the slightest trace of the Chinese writing, nor the Sanscrit, Tamul, Telengi, Arabic or, in fine, of any caligraphy of Asia or Africa. On passing through Singapore I saw an ancient stone, whose inscription no one had been able to decipher, but it was the same kind of writing as the ancient Philippine, though from its bad state of preservation it was impossible for me to read it. This proves nothing further as to tho communication which existed between the two countries, since the language affords of this fact an irrefragable testimony ; but it is one for believing that they did not obtain the art of writing from Asia. In the Bugin language of the Celebes also, there is an alphabet in which no Asiatic analogy is discoverable, that is in the estimation of the author of Estado de las Islas Filipinas en 1842, from whose work published in two volumes in 1843 at Madrid, the late Judge Kennedy quotes the above, and adds (Ethnological Society 1855) as to the Singapore inscription the following :— " Mr Crawford, in the valuable paper he read before this society on the various alphabets of the Indian Archipelago (vol ii., page 253) also refers to this stone at Singapore as hearing a very rude but long inscription in what he calls an unknown character, but which he supposed to be the ancient Malay of Sumatra. . . . In page 79 of his dissertation he says that there is an other stone inscription in Borneo of the same characters as that at Singapore." This latter occupies a space on the perpendicular side of a rock, called batu tulis, of 2ft deep and 4ft long, and is interesting as found in the interior of an island whose inhabitants no longer can read it or possess the art of writing. It was discovered in 1840 by two American missionaries. It would be well were fac-similes of these two inscriptions procured for the Melbourne museum; they would surely be more valuable than specimens of tho krises and mats of Malay rajahs. Mr Kennedy goes on to say :—

" From these statements of our (Spanish) author we find—First that the original inhabitants of the Philippines found there by the Spaniards, comprising the brown population and the black, or nigrito, all speak what, in effect, is one language, divided into four dialects, and what is more remarkable, that it is, in fact, the same as the Malayan or Singapore. This Malay language we learn further from other sources, extends in its various dialects not only over the Indian Archipelago, to which the Continental writers have given the name of Oceania, but also into the Pacific, and to the mainland of Asia, and in some degree to the inland of Madagascar. Mr Marsden and some other authorities have thought it confined to the brown-coloured people commonly known as Malays, but later information collected or give us by Mr Earl, Mr Crawford, and Dr Latham, shows us that the some language is also possessed in a greater or less degree by a number of the black coloured tribes, while some of the brown tribes have equal degrees of difference among themselves."

Far more is known now of these languages than in Mr Kennedy's day. We know now that the Malayo-Polynesian is as universal in Madagascar as in any island of the Indian Archipelago, and in Melanesia or Papuanesia as in Madagascar or the Eastern Pacific. The notion of an indigenous negro race in the islands having been conquered by Malay invaders, driven to the hills, and known as orang-utan is now thoroughly exploded. The negroes must have been mixed, exactly as they are now with the Polynesians, that is, absorbed into and forming part of the race or people before it emigrated from its original home into the island world, whose inhabitants it became. This renders an investigation of the Polynesian antiquities all the easier and more hopeful, as wherever found in Madagascar, Easter Island, the Philippines Borneo, New Guinea, or New Hebrides they may be expected to be homogeneous.

William von Humboldt who believed that the Polynesian languages were of the Indo European stock was not able to affiliate the Polynesian alphabets in accordance with that theory. On the contrary, he was obliged to say that they were of unknown origin, and that their prototype must be of remote antiquity and had probably served also as the base of the devanagari itself. This perfectly accords with our theory of the direct descent of these Polynesian alphabetic characters from the Phœncian. In the fourth volume of the Journal of the Anthropological Institute there is an interesting paper by Mr J P Harrison on "Phœnician Characters from Sumatra," with a plate in which the Sumatran and Phœnician characters are placed side by side thus :—






We give these here, that people going to the islands may take them with them ; and now let us hear some of Mr Harrison's remarks upon them :—

" These characters are said to be still in use in the districts of Rejang, Lemba, and Passumah in Sumatra. MSS. on 31 tablets, formed of split bamboos, were, it appears, acquired many years ago by the old East India Company, and are now in the library of the India office. Nearly the whole of the letters inscribed on the convex surfaces of the bamboos are identical in form with Phoenician characters mostly of a pure period, and afford a very remarkable instance of the survival of an early form of writing adopted by a non-literary race."

The theory that the Sumatrans are of the same race as the original inventors and users of the so called Phœnician alphabet has evidently not occurred to Mr Harrison.

" The twentieth letter of the Rejang alphabet is the only one that has not been identified. It should be mentioned that the order of the letters is not the same as in the Phœnician, and the letters themselves are generally reversed; their values also are different."

And now for Mr Harrisons theory of explanation :—

"Both in Java . . . and Sumatra . . .written traditions mixed with fable, refer to the arrival of ships in remote times, and at two different epochs, from the Red Sea and tho Persian Gulf—in the one case at a time when vessels still coasted round the Bay of Bengal ; in the other, in the age of Alexander, who is said to have built a bridge 'in the sea,' which may mean that ships commanded by some of his officers arrived direct from India. Three of his descendants are also said to have become kings of Palembang, &c. The ships would have been manned principally by Pœnician sailors. Stript of legendary matter, there seems nothing contrary to, or inconsistent with, history in these traditions, which consequently possess a certain value, apart from tho evidence afforded by the MSS. The importance attending the identification of these characters is principally ethnographical."

We do not believe for a moment in tho idea here hinted at—possible, of course, but improbable to the last degree—that either at or previous to the time of Alexander some Phoenician sailors taught their alphabet to the alien aborigines of Malaysian Polynesia. These aborigines brought their alphabet with them from the Persian Gulf, where it was invented by people of their own race, and whence it was carried all over the world, east and west and adopted sometimes by people of alien race. But the probability is that this alphabet, which seems to be the nearest of all living or in present use to the old Phœnician, was never used by people of alien race to its first inventors.

Not to discuss this point at greater length on the present occasion, let me conclude by observing that the vowels in these alphabets, as in most Shemitic alphabets, are denoted by points or marks joined, or placed near to the consonants, and by giving the following Sumatran characters with the corresponding ancient Phœnician :—






These Polynesian characters are from Crawford's Dissertation. Many other interesting comparisons could be made, but these seem pretty conclusive, and it is to be hoped that scholars will take up the matter and deal with it exhaustively. The eleven Polynesian alphabets are undoubtedly of the same origin. The comparison of these alphabets with the Phœnician, and of the languages written in these alphabets with that written in the Phœnician, give results altogether in favour of the theory of the original peopling of Oceania by the Chaldæo-Sabæans, or Phœnicians of the Persian Gulf. According to it, Sumatra would be the first part of Eastern Oceania touched at and colonised by them. And this, no doubt, sufficiently accounts for the tradition among the Malays, that Sumatra was the island from which their race migrated into all the neighbourng islands of the archipelago. Peculiar interest therefore, attaches to Sumatra; but how little do we know of it. Its people seem to have degenerated. Some of them are cannibals ; and the only cannibals in the world who have an alphabet. As Latham in his peculiar style says, they are " cannibals of a peculiar kind, under peculiar circumstances. They are cannibals and yet not pagans. They are cannibals and yet not without an alphabet. They are cannibals with either the germ or the fragments of a literature." According to the theory we advocate, not "the germ" but "the fragments of a literature;" and the fragments, also, of an ancient civilisation that once swayed the whole world, other fragments of which have been found on the shores or at the head of the Persian Gulf.


Very probably ancient inscriptions will yet be discovered in Madagascar. Sibree speaks of "carvings" on grave pillars or monuments. One—of an early king of tho Betsileo— has "each face elaborately carved with different patterns arranged in squares," and "bears some resemblance to the old Runic stones." He also notes among the inscriptions the circle and the leaf ornament as to the symbolical import of which in Polynesian archaeology we shall speak below. Let these Malagasy rune-like "carvings," or engravings, be investigated and deciphered.

Have we any facts connecting with the Persian Gulf, Madagascar on the one hand, and Eastern Oceania (Sumatra &c.) on the other, to the extent demanded by this theory? I think this question may be answered in the affirmative. One thing is certain—such connexion both on the one side and on the other, with the Persian Gulf must have been, if at all, by means of ships or vessels. Another thing seems also certain—that just as the Sumatran alphabet came from the Persian Gulf, so also did the Polynesian or Oceanic ship or vessel. The most essential distinguishing feature of this vessel is that its planks are not nailed, but sewn together with coir, sennit, or yarn made of cocoanut fibre. From time immemorial such has been the characteristic of the ships of the Shemites of the Persian Gulf or Arabia. And so peculiar is it that when a ship was found in the ninth century wrecked, near the Pillars of Hercules, at the entrance of the Mediterranean Sea, an Arab writer of that century mentions that it was owing to its construction, concluded to have circumnavigated Africa. According to Herodotus Phœnician ships had done that 600 years before the Christian era. Vessels of this construction are found all over Oceania, and those only if we exclude Ceylon and the neighbouring coast of India, and their presence here is not only accounted for but demanded by our theory of the Persian Gulf being their original starting point. Barbosa (1511) says of the vessels of Arabs and Persians on the coast of Malabar, of 200 tons, that they "have no nails. They sew their planks with mat cords," and trade between India and Arabia. In the account of the travels of two Mohammedans, ninth century, we read of people in the Persian Gulf "who cross over to the islands (there) that produce cocoanuts, taking with them their tools, and make ships out of it. With the bark they make the cordage and sew the planks together, and of the leaves they make sails, and having thus completed the vessel they load it with cocoanuts and set sail." Marco Polo, speaking of the ships of the Persian Gulf, says that they do not use nails, but woollen pins, and fasten them with threads made of the Indian nut," by which, no doubt, he means the cocoanut, the Polynesian nut. See an interesting paper by Colonel Lane-Fox on "Early Modes of Navigation." This, then is the most essential peculiar feature of Polynesian ship-building, and it has come from the Shemites of the Persian Gulf, and it has been carried by it inventors into the Isles of the Sea, where it it is continued to this day.

Can the Polynesian or Oceanic outrigger, peculiar to Oceania with the same inevitable exceptions of the Andamans, Ceylon, and neighbouring coast of India, be traced to the Persian Gulf? Outrigger canoes or vessels have their planks sewn together. Pliny speaks of them in the waters to the west of Ceylon, i.e., between Ceylon and the Persian Gulf. The common Polynesian name for outrigger—Samoan, ama, Ambrim, ham—is I think Shemitic, and from the Persian Gulf, being either the same as, or cognate with the Arabic 'aamah, "pieces of wood bound together, upon which one embarks on the sea," in fact a kind of raft ; and the outrigger canoe is a compromise between a raft and a boat or ship.

According to the oldest Malaysian tradition, the progenitors of the present inhabitants of the Malayan islands came in ships from "Laut Mira," or the Red Sea, by which not to be understood what we call the Red Sea, but what Herodotus and the ancients call by that name, including the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, or the Indian Ocean surrounding Arabia. It was so called because it was the Sea of the Red Men (Himyarites, Phœnicians, or as we say, Shemites.) See Smith's Bible Dictionary. The Red Sea, or Sea of Himyer is what he Malays call "Luat Mira," for Mira is the Malay word signifying "red," as does Himyer, and it is the same as, or cognate to, the word Himyer. And laut, "sea" —a word found in a thousand isles of Oceania and in various forms as wolat, olat, elau, alau, &c.—is in Arabic 'aallat or 'aallah, the sea close to the shore. In Vate the word also means the sea close to the shore. Laut Mira, then, is the Himyaritic Sea.

Argus (Melbourne, Vic. : 1848 - 1957), Monday 29 October 1883, page 4