Ill] AND HISTORIC TIMES 145 



with him reached the roadstead of Sumatra, Bohruz, the vice- 

 admiral, came on board and having questioned the merchants 

 permitted them to land. The town of Sumatra was four miles 

 from the port, and Bohruz wrote to the Sultan to tell of the 

 arrival of Batuta and his fellows. " The latter ordered the Emir 

 Daoulecah, accompanied by the noble Kadhi, Emir Sayyid of 

 Shiraz, and Tadj Eddin of Ispahan and other lawyers to come meet 

 me. They brought one of the Sultan's horses as well as others. 

 I mounted on horseback and my companions did the same." 

 Sumatra was a fine town recently fortified by a wooden stockade 

 and wooden towers. The Sultan Almalic Azzhahir professed 

 that form of orthodox Muhammadanism known as Shafi'y, and 

 he surrounded himself with men learned in the Koran, and his 

 subjects held the same tenets. As this is that one of the four 

 orthodox forms of Islam which is now universal with minute 

 exceptions in the Indian Archipelago and as it is also the 

 prevalent doctrine of Arabia, particularly of the maritime portion 

 of that country, it is clear that the traders who first introduced 

 Islam into the Archipelago came direct from Arabia, and that 

 too at a time when, as we shall soon see, great numbers of horses 

 were being annually brought direct from Arabia and the Persian 

 Gulf to southern as well as western India. From Sumatra our 

 traveller passed to Java (termed by him Moule Djaouah), the 

 entire population of which were infidels. He came to the court 

 of a great sultan, whom he found sitting on the ground before 

 his palace reviewing his troops, who were all on foot. " Nobody 

 iii the country has a horse, not even the Sultan 1 . The people 

 ride elephants and fight from these animals." This Sultan and 

 all his people were infidels, that is, they practised Hinduism. 

 These very important passages render it certain that at this 

 period there were no horses in Java, and hence the Javanese 

 striped ponies cannot be regarded as a primitive stock ; but as 

 horses were found with Arabs in Sumatra, where that people 



1 Voyages d'Ibn Batoutah, Vol. iv. p. 245. My friend Prof. Bevan has 

 kindly pointed out to me that two texts give the reading "not even the Sultan," 

 though others read "except the Sultan." But as the Sultan when reviewing his 

 troops was not on horseback, but seated on the ground, it is most improbable 

 that he had a horse. Transcribers and editors would naturally be inclined to 

 assign a horse to the Sultan, even if no one else in the island had one. 



R. H. 10 



