History of Indonesia

The archipelago: its prehistory and early historical records

Remains of Homo erectus (originally called Pithecanthropus, or Java man) indicate that the ancestors of humans already inhabited the island of Java roughly 1.7 million years ago, when much of the western archipelago was still linked by land bridges. Some 6,000 years ago a rapid postglacial rise in sea level submerged these bridges. What remained was the largest island complex in the world: the Indonesian archipelago.

Not surprisingly, the sea has greatly influenced Indonesian history, and the boat has long been a pervasive metaphor in the arts and the literary and oral traditions of the islands. Monsoon winds, blowing north and south of the Equator, have facilitated communication within the archipelago and with the rest of maritime Asia. In early times timber and spices of Java and the eastern islands were known afar, as were the resins from the exceptionally wet equatorial jungle in the western islands of Sumatra and Borneo. By the first centuries ce, goods were already being shipped overseas, and navigable rivers had brought the Indonesian hinterland into contact with distant markets.

Although records of foreign trade begin only in the early centuries ce, it is possible that people from the Indonesian archipelago were sailing to other parts of Asia much earlier. The Roman historian Pliny the Elder’s Natural History suggests that, in the 1st century ce, Indonesian outriggers were engaged in trade with the east coast of Africa. Indonesian settlements may have existed at that time in Madagascar, an island with distinct Indonesian cultural traits. The geographer Ptolemy, in the following century, incorporated information from Indian merchants in his Guide to Geography concerning “Iabadiou,” presumably referring to Java, and “Malaiou,” which, with its variants, may be a rendition of “Malayu,” a term once broadly applied to various interior regions and kingdoms of Sumatra. (In contemporary usage and spelling, the term Melayu refers to Malay peoples.)

Regular voyages between Indonesia and China did not begin before the 5th century ce. Chinese literature in the 5th and 6th centuries mentions western Indonesian tree produce, including camphor from northern Sumatra. It also refers to two Indonesian resins as “Persian resins from the south ocean,” which suggests that the Indonesian products had been added to the existing seaborne trade in resins from western Asia. It is likely that Indonesian shippers of the time were exploiting southern China’s economic difficulties, incurred as a result of the region’s having been cut off from the ancient trade route of Central Asia. Small estuary kingdoms were beginning to prosper as international entrepôts. Although the locations of these kingdoms are unknown, the commercial prominence of Palembang in the 7th century suggests that the Malays of southeastern Sumatra had been active in the “Persian” trade with southern China.

Easy overseas communication did not, however, result in the formation of territorially large kingdoms. The many estuaries of Sumatra and Borneo, facing the inland seas, possessed an abundance of nutritious seafood that made possible a settled mode of life, and for the people of these estuaries, contact with their neighbours was more important than any connections they could make with overseas lands. Local groups, endowed with more or less comparable resources, were most concerned with protecting their separate identities. Such provincial interests similarly prevailed on the island of Java, where the lava-enriched soil, watered by gently flowing rivers, encouraged wet-rice production and a patchwork pattern of settled areas in the river valleys separated by mountains and jungle.

Long before records began, many of the coastal and riverine groups of the Indonesian archipelago were evolving an elementary form of hierarchy, accompanied by artistic symbols of rank. No single group, however, was large or powerful enough to overrun and occupy neighbouring territories; rather, the various peoples’ energies were absorbed by ever more intensive exploitation of their own natural resources. While those living on or close to the sea knew that geographic isolation was out of the question, they regarded their maritime environment as a means of enhancing their well-being through imports or new skills. Their outward orientation, then, ultimately encouraged the pursuit of local interests rather than inculcating any sense of belonging to a larger community. Indeed, the structure of Indonesian written and oral sources suggests that the origins of kingdoms on the coasts of the Java Sea were associated with the success of local heroes in turning the arrival of foreign trading treasure to their advantage.

Many Indonesian place-names have remained unchanged since the beginning of documented history. In such places, which were often in close proximity to each other, each leader saw himself at the centre of the world that mattered to him, which was not, until later, the archipelago or even a single island but his own strip of coast or river valley. Some centres achieved local hegemony, but never to the extent of extinguishing permanently the pretensions of rival centres. Thus, the early history of Indonesia comprises many regional histories that only gradually intersect with each other.

The historical fragmentation of the archipelago, which was sustained by its rich climate and accentuated (rather than diminished) by easy access to the outside world, is evident in Indonesia’s linguistic diversity. The speakers of Austronesian languages almost certainly drifted into the region in small groups from the Asian mainland or the Pacific Islands over long periods of time. When they reached the coasts and rivers of the archipelago, they did not suddenly assume a common identity. On the contrary, they remained scattered groups, sometimes coexisting with descendants of earlier populations of the Pleistocene Epoch (roughly 1,800,000 to 10,000 years ago), who in their turn had also learned to make economic use of their environment over an immense span of cultural time. The hundreds of languages within the western branch of the Austronesian family (which includes most languages of Indonesia) are an index of the manner in which the peoples of the Indonesian archipelago submitted to the social, economic, and natural realities of their environment.

Stone or metal inscriptions, together with surviving copies of early religious texts, are the most important sources of documentary information. However, because these documents are always concerned with specific places, construction of a comprehensive narrative history of any extensive area is virtually impossible. The reality behind many interregional relationships, then, necessarily remains a riddle. Nevertheless, the ideas of noblemen, as articulated in architecture and literature, reflect varying degrees of exposure to influences from beyond the archipelago. Moreover, they reveal points of intersection in the beliefs and practices of communities throughout the region; all groups maintained basic assumptions concerning the dependence of humans on the goodwill of supernatural entities.