246 MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



These Battas, however, despite their undoubted cannibalism 1 , 

 cannot be called savages, at least without some 



The Battas- 



cuitured reserve. They are skilful stock-breeders and agri- 



culturists, raising fine crops of maize and rice ; they 

 dwell together in large, settled communities with an organised 

 government, hereditary chiefs, popular assemblies, and a written 

 civil and penal code. There is even an effective postal system, 

 which utilises for letter-boxes the hollow tree-trunks at all the 

 cross-roads, and is largely patronised by the young men and 

 women, all of whom read and write, and carry on an animated 

 correspondence in their degraded Devanagari script, which is 

 written on palm-leaves in vertical lines running upwards and from 

 right to left. The Battas also excel in several industries, such as 

 pottery, weaving, jewellery, iron work, and house-building, their 

 picturesque dwellings, which resemble Swiss chalets, rising to two 

 stories above the ground-floor reserved for the live stock. For 

 these arts they are no doubt largely indebted to their Hindu 

 teachers, from whom also they have inherited some of their 

 religious ideas, such as the triune deity Creator, Preserver, and 

 Destroyer besides other inferior divinities collectively called 

 diebata, a modified form of the Indian devate^. 



1 Again confirmed by Dr Volz and H. von Autenrieth, who explored 

 Battaland early in 1898, and penetrated to the territory of the "Cannibal 

 Pakpaks " (Geogr. your. June 1898, p. 672); not however "for the first 

 time," as here stated. The Pakpaks had already been visited in 1853 by 

 Von Rosenberg, who found cannibalism so prevalent that " Niemand Anstand 

 nimmt das essen von Menschenfleisch einzugestehen " (op. cit. I. p. 59). 



- It is interesting to note that by the aid of the Lampongs alphabet, South 

 Sumatra, the Rev. John Mathew reads the word Daibattah in the legend on 

 the head-dress of a gigantic figure seen by Sir George Grey on the roof of a 

 cave on the Glenelg River, North-west Australia (The Cave Paintings of 

 Australia, &c. in your. Anthrop. Inst. 1894, p. 44 sq.). He quotes from 

 Coleman's Mythology of the Hindus the statement that "the Battas of Sumatra 

 believe in the existence of one supreme being, whom they name Debati Hasi 

 Asi. Since completing the work of creation they suppose him to have remained 

 perfectly quiescent, having wholly committed the government to his three 

 sons, who do not govern in person, but by vakeels or proxies." Here is 

 possibly another confirmation of the view that early Malayan migrations or 

 expeditions, some even to Australia, took place in pre-Muhammadan times, 

 long before the rise and diffusion of the Orang Malayu in the Archipelago. 



