Flood Myths of Sundaland

A crossing walked before it drowned

Alorese consultants hold several related histories, and they do not agree in their details. In one, the ancestors walk from Rusa toward Pantar with the water coming up behind them. In another, Alor and Pantar are one country until a great flood separates them and the small islands surface between. A third remembers a kingdom on Rusa swallowed by the sea, and survivors climbing into the Pantar highlands, where the settlements they founded still stand in the order they arrived and hold their precedence by that order.

That last clause is the one to hold on to. The story is not only about water. It is the deed to a set of villages.

The geography can be checked. Kealy and colleagues’ shoreline reconstruction puts Alor, Pantar, Pura, Rusa, Kambing and their neighbours inside one coastline whenever the sea stood low, and breaks the Alor–Pantar connection in the early Holocene. Sulistyono and colleagues recorded the oral histories in their living form. The two accounts describe the same event from opposite ends of eleven thousand years.

Some of the material is younger. Koli Rawang and the drowned-kingdom episodes are placed locally in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, and layering of that kind is normal in a tradition that has been useful for a long time. Under it sits the plainer claim, the one the histories open with and the one the seafloor agrees to: Alor and Pantar were one country, and they are not now.

The line that became Bali Strait

The Manik Angkeran story opens by stating, as a fact requiring no argument, that Bali was joined to Java. Everything that follows is the account of how it stopped being so. The young man gambles away what his father gave him, goes to the dragon Naga Basuki for gold, is killed and restored; and at the end the priest Sidi Mantra draws a line across the neck of land with his staff. Water runs into the line. The line becomes the strait, and it does not close again. Father and son are left on opposite islands, each with obligations the other cannot discharge.

A telling published by the Buleleng regency keeps the living local form, with the Hindu names and the moral drama intact. Those names are later architecture. Under them sits a fact that the archaeology does not dispute: Bali stood on the eastern rim of the Sunda landmass and was joined to Java whenever the sea fell far enough to expose the sill, which it did repeatedly and last of all within the span of modern human occupation.

What the story does with that fact is the interesting part. It converts a drowned isthmus into a jurisdiction. The strait is not described as a loss; it is described as a boundary with people on either side of it who now owe each other different things. That move — water in, order out — is the one this essay follows across the whole region.

The instrument and the flood

On the Malay Peninsula the bullroarer and the flood turn out to be the same subject matter. The instrument is not beside the story of the water; it is the machinery inside it.

In the 1910s Ivor Evans was on the Tekai River in Pahang among the people he called the Sakai-Jakun — the Semaq Beri. He asked what thunder was. Thunder, they told him, is the noise the spirit Nenek makes by clapping his arms against his sides to sound his armpits. And the lightning that comes with it is Nenek flashing a thin board tied to a string. Evans, who knew the object when he saw it, glossed the board as a bullroarer.

Now look at what the floods do on that same peninsula. Every Peninsular tradition on this map is a thunder-and-storm flood. At a Kelantan circumcision feast the animals are set fighting and the crowd loses its manners, and the water comes down off the mountains onto the settlement; only the servants sent out for firewood are elsewhere when it arrives. On Gunung Raja the Temuan couple sit out the storm inside a gaharu tree, living on its soaked pulp. Among the Orang Seletar the water rises to Gunung Pulai and the houseboats are tied to the mountain until the ropes part.

The peninsula also keeps the rule running the other way: sound that must not be made. At Ijok in upper Perak, some children copy the call of the sagwong hornbill. Thunder and lightning answer, and the grandmothers Yak Lepeh, Yak Manoid and Yak Takel open the ground and bring the water up from underneath it. Every Negrito in that country drowns except one halak — a shaman. The camps that went under are still pointed out near Ijok, and the notes of the sagwong and the chorh may not be copied to this day. Above Jeram on the Pahang the offence is burning lice, or dressing a monkey up to be laughed at, and the village goes down into the ground with one house-post left standing; on the Jinteh in Ulu Pahang it is painting a pet macaque’s face to look like a person’s, and the water comes up from below with a dragon in it. A cosmology in which whirled sound makes the thunder is also one in which the wrong sound, the wrong laugh, calls the water — and the prohibitions are still kept.

So: the sky-spirit makes lightning by whirling a board on a cord, and what comes with the lightning is the flood. The instrument is not adjacent to the flood story on the Malay Peninsula. It is the mechanism inside it. Swung sound is how thunder is made; thunder is what brings the water. That is one cosmology described from two directions — from the sky by the Semaq Beri, from the ground by every flood on the peninsula — and the Atlas happens to hold both halves.

On Flores the same cosmology surfaces with a snake in it. The little bamboo jata is taken into the fields at Ende and swung to call rain, and eastward among the Lio children are warned off it: the noise is said to sound like a poisonous snake on the move, and to be capable of bringing the real animal near. Rain called by a whirled blade, and a snake in the sound of it — in a stretch of country where the Riung floods are rain sent as punishment and the Bornean floods of the same family begin with the killing of a snake.

The snake taken for a fallen log

Men went out from Kampong Tudu in the Tempasuk district for fencing wood, and found a great trunk lying on the ground. They cut into it, and it bled. They walked the length of it and found a head. It was an enormous snake.

They staked it down and killed it, flayed it, carried the meat back and held a feast on it, and out of the skin they made a great drum. Then they beat the drum to try it, and it made no sound at all. They kept trying it, and for a long time it stayed silent. Then in the middle of the night the drum began to sound on its own — Duk, Duk, Kagul; Duk, Duk, Kagul — and a hurricane came and took the village away. Some houses went out to sea with the people still inside them. Others came down at Tempasuk and at other places along the coast, and those are the villages that stand there now.

“Then in the middle of the night the drum began to sound of itself: ‘Duk, Duk, Kagul; Duk, Duk, Kagul’… and a hurricane came and carried away the village.” — I. H. N. Evans, ‘Folk Stories of the Tempassuk and Tuaran Districts’, JRAI 43 (1913), pp. 469–470

An instrument that refuses to be played, and then speaks when nobody is touching it, and the catastrophe arrives on the sound. It would be hard to write a closer statement of the Atlas’s own subject inside a flood myth, and the Dusun did not write it for us.

The other half of it is across the mountains in Sarawak. In the Iban telling of the same serpent — the sky-python taken for a log, cut up and cooked — the sections of bamboo are set on the fire, and voices come out of the bamboo. They are not the voices of anyone present. They curse the hills and the plains and call on the waters to swallow them up. Only then does the sky darken and the rain begin. The account was published in 1906 by Leo Nyuak, himself Iban, in Edmund Dunn’s translation. In that telling what ends the water is recovery: rice, and friction fire from the dog and the creeper, restart the world.

Two neighbouring peoples on one island; the same serpent, mistaken in both for a fallen tree and found to bleed; and in both the flood is announced by a sound coming out of a vessel made from — or cooking — the snake’s body. On Flores the family keeps the structure and swaps the animal: at Vangka the men of Tado bring fish up from the coast, the villagers who have never seen a live one put two into a pig trough to watch them swim, the whole place is still laughing when the sky breaks, and it rains for seven days and seven nights. In the uplands at Vongko Ngandong a burning brand is tied to a dog’s tail so it will carry fire to the next house in the rain; the dog runs mad in circles in the yard, everyone laughs out loud, and the village goes down into the ground. Where it stood there is a lake, and the lake is called Tivu Ngandong.

And in the same Riung district, Arndt was told what it costs to own such an instrument. At Nggolo Vulu, Lindi and Latji found a drum down at the shore: two mborong trees were bringing it to the beach, and it was sounding with nobody striking it. They carried it home — the female drum, Kalaur — and Latji made a male to match her, Radja Bheco. After the feast a Dheva came to them in a dream and set the terms. The drum may not be brought out and beaten at will: beat it at the wrong time, he said, and I will send storm and rain and let a great flood come. It may not be kept in a house either. So it hangs in a cave beside the village, and it is lent to anyone holding the paras, the buffalo-spearing feast, and returned with buffalo and pigs — and if it is not returned that way, the weather comes.

The Dusun drum announces a flood; the Riung drum holds one in reserve. On both islands the instrument that sounds of itself speaks with the flood’s voice, and it is kept under contract — found at the water, sexed and named, housed in a cave rather than among people, brought out for exactly one ceremony, and able to drown the country if the terms are broken.

The mouse names its price

West of Lake Poso, at Wawo mPebato, the sea came up over the land and put every mountain under except the summit of Pebato. A woman named Indo i mPaloa got aboard a pig’s trough and rowed it with a pot-ladle, and she alone stayed alive. When the ground dried she bore a son; when he was grown he became her husband.

Then she went looking for seed rice, and found a sheaf caught high up in a tree where the water had left it, out of reach. A mouse offered to fetch it down. But the mouse named its price first: from this time forward the mice would eat their share of every crop.

She agreed. The agreement holds. When there are only a few mice in the field the To Pebato are not troubled about it — they say the mice have come to take what is lawfully theirs. The rice that feeds the world is rice a mouse untied from a treetop, and the fee is paid every harvest, in the field, in perpetuity.

Look at what that story is for. It is not a warning and it is not a chronicle. It is a contract, concluded in the first days after the water, between the human population and the mice, which is still being honoured and which explains a specific tolerance in the behaviour of living farmers. The flood is the moment at which the terms were agreed.

The Mori of Tinompo, inland to the east, take the same structure and solve a harder problem with it. A man got word that a great water was coming, built a boat that could be shut over the top, and went into it with his wife, three sons, four daughters, the animals and the rice. Everyone else died. The Mori call the flood bomba osio, the nine waves: nine times the water carried the boat up to the sky and nine times set it back on the earth.

Then they came out, and there was one father and one mother and no way forward. A brother and sister slept facing each other. A mosquito bit the brother hard; he struck at it; and by that movement his sister conceived. Ask the Mori whether the two were guilty and the answer is no — simply no. The mosquito answers for it. The people go free.

That is a legal instrument dressed as a joke, and it is doing serious work: it licenses the descent of an entire people from an act the people themselves prohibit. Traditions on this map take the same route again and again — the To Pebato mother and son, the Mori siblings, the Mandaya woman and her son Uacatan at Cateel, Wigan and Bugan in the Ifugao mountains. One neighbour states the reverse as law. In the Bugis La Galigo, siblings may not become a couple, and the sanction is named: the country will submerge, it will be ruined, and none of the people in the world will be saved. The act that restarts humanity all along this map is precisely what sinks it in Bugis law, and there the flood is the penalty clause attached to the prohibition.

In the northern Kankanay country the siblings hold out, and the whole aftermath waits on a joke. Kabunian raises the seas until only one mountaintop is left, and on it the first two creatures on earth, the brother and sister Lumawig and Bangan. When the water falls he orders them to marry so the earth can be peopled again. They refuse, because they are brother and sister, and say they will do it only if he can make them laugh. He finds a way. They have four children, and the four children are dealt the world: one is given the cañao to perform, and his line becomes the Igorot; the second is set to weave abel cloth and becomes the ancestor of the Ilocano; the third is given the power of issuing commands; and the fourth is made a spirit dwelling in stones and trees, ancestor of the tumungaw and mangmangkik, who are still blamed for illness and typhoons and still named in ritual. The laughter licenses the marriage, and the marriage deals out the ceremony, the craft, the command and the spirit world in a single hand.

What the water hands back

The pattern is not confined to these islands. In the Chinese southwest Wang Xianzhao sorted 232 minority flood texts by how they finish and found that 79 per cent of them end by instituting something — the clans, the surnames, the division of the peoples, the marriage rule, the first ceremony. The flood is the hinge between a former arrangement and the present one, and the present one is what the story exists to authorise.

Island Southeast Asia does it at least as thoroughly. The clearest case in the region is on Seram, and it deserves its full form rather than the digest.

In the account van der Crab published in 1862, the water covers everything, and then the mountain Nusaku comes up out of it. Three men are living on the mountain: Uli Lima, Uli Siwa and Uli Ase. The bird Marapati brings word that other mountains have surfaced. Uli Ase goes off to the new islands — and those islands are the Uliassers to this day, which is what people still call them, on the chart, in the shipping notices, in the name of a district. Then the Ceramese divide into the Pata Siwa and the Pata Lima, the moieties of nine and of five, which organised alliance, warfare and ritual across the island into the twentieth century.

One story: an archipelago named after a man, and a whole population sorted into the two halves it is still sorted into. That is not a memory of a disaster. It is a founding charter that happens to open with water.

Nias states its charter with an heirloom. The mountains of the island quarrel over which of them is highest, and the ancestor Balugu Luomewona settles the strife by throwing his golden comb into the sea, where it becomes a giant crab that blocks the sea’s drains. The water rises until only a few summits are left; when the outlets reopen, the island returns and the survivors come down from the peaks. That, the islanders say, is how the great ancestor ended the quarrel between the mountains — and the quarrelsomeness is proverbial among his descendants still. In Sundermann’s telling the hand that throws the comb is a woman’s: Silewe Nazarata, his wife, floods the world to humble the proud.

Once you are looking for the charter, the map fills up with them. At Vangka on Flores the rain stops only when the elders take a chicken and a pig to the spring and the sacrificial post and set them before Mori Keraeng with the formula: we offer these in place of our bodies, because we laughed at the fish; let pig and chicken die, and let us not die. That exchange is not a detail of the plot. It is the exchange, still performed, and the prohibition it enforces — no laughing at animals — is a live rule of conduct in the district. The Riung flood is the case law behind it.

At Mount Mugao in eastern Lepanto the survivors are given tobacco and a law: the sacred eels of Mugao are protected, under threat of another destruction. At Boawae the ancestor Dooy survives the water in a ship, and his grave and a seven-masted model of that ship stand inside the harvest ceremony. At Lakimola on Rote the sea agrees to withdraw when it is shown an animal whose hairs it cannot count — a cat wins the argument — and a sea eagle brings back soil and seed; the restoration became an annual harvest offering, which is to say the flood produced a calendar. Among the Tambunan Dusun, Muhgumbul’s boat comes to rest at Nunuk Ragang and his descendants disperse as the named Dusun groups; the story is a genealogy of the district. Among the Higaunon and Agusanon of Mindanao, as Oona Paredes shows, the panud holds genealogy, land claim and law together in a single narration, which is why it is still recited.

Even the briefest tellings on the map do this. The Tinguian “Hidden Fire” has no punished crowd, no ark, no repopulation: Kaboniyan sends a flood that covers all the land, and fire, with nowhere dry to stand, goes into bamboo and stone and iron. That is the whole story. Its economy is its force. It exists to explain why a man with a length of bamboo and a stone can still make fire, which is the most practical charter of all.

And in the Bontoc account taken down by Seidenadel in the language itself, the flood is not a punishment but a public-works project: Lumawig’s sons decide that a flat world is bad for hunting, and inundate it on purpose so that the mountains will come out rough. A brother and sister survive on Pokis, a dog and a deer fetch fire from Kalauwitan, and reeds become the rest of the people. The Cordillera is the deliberate output.

The bridge that is not there

On the north coast of Sumba, at Cape Sasar, the origin is recited in paired ritual couplets, one line answering the other:

The ancestors of long ago came to the distant cape of Sasar, from another land, the foreign land; the forefathers of ancient time came to the adze-shaped stone bridge, from across the seas, the strange land. — the Kodi panggecango couplets, in Janet Hoskins, The Play of Time: Kodi Perspectives on Calendars, History and Exchange, p. 33

They walked over on stone, the recitation says, and the stone is not there now.

From the cape they went out and took the island, and the taking is named in order: Lord Ngedo to Kodi, Lord Wango to Rara, then Ede, Manola, Manekka, Lombo, Karendi, Bukambero, Weyewa, Gaura, Lamboya, Rua, Wanokaka, Lauli, Lawonda, and Kambera of the different speech. The sequence is not decoration. The order in which the domains are named is the order in which they were founded, and the houses that hold them hold them by that order — in ritual precedence, in who speaks first, in who owes what to whom. It is the most complete charter on this map: an entire island's political geography, in couplets, entered by a bridge of stone.

The bridge was never a causeway, and what it actually is turns out to be the better thing.

Sumba was never joined to Sumbawa or to Flores. It is not shelf; it is an uplifted continental fragment riding the fore-arc ridge, and the straits around it are deep and stayed open through the entire Pleistocene. No glacial lowstand, however severe, exposes that floor. There is no drowned causeway off Cape Sasar for the stone bridge to be, and there never was one to remember.

What there is, is a crossing. The Austronesian arrival on Sumba runs outward from this same cape — the language and the genetics both trace it from there — and a sea route travelled by people who arrive from “the foreign land” and then proceed to found every domain on the island in a fixed sequence is exactly the thing a recitation of this kind is built to hold. The stone bridge is the route rendered as pavement: a way that could be walked, once, by the ancestors, and that no one can walk now. The recitation is not wrong about the past. It is telling the truth about an arrival in the register available to it.

Other floods on the same islands

Some of the traditions here are cosmology rather than event, and they are none the worse for it. From the beginning, the Toba Batak say, the earth rode on the head of the serpent Naga Padoha. He grew tired of the weight and shook his head; the earth slid off and sank, and there was nothing in the world but water. Batara Guru’s daughter Puti Orla Bulan asked leave to go down, and came riding a white owl with a dog beside her, and found nowhere to put her foot — so her father let a mountain fall out of the sky for her to stand on: Bakkara, which is in the Batak country still. All the rest of the land grew outward from that mountain. The earth was set back on the serpent’s horns, and the swallow that dips as it flies bound him hand and foot so it could never fall again. He still shakes his head, though, and that is what an earthquake is.

Other traditions turn water directly into a named landform. In the Bandung basin, Sangkuriang dams the Citarum and is close to finishing a lake and a boat before dawn when Dayang Sumbi fakes the sunrise; he kicks the boat over, and it is Tangkuban Parahu — the upturned prau — on the skyline, while the unfinished dam lets the water out of the basin. Lakes did occupy that basin, the last of them draining in the late Pleistocene. The story hands you the mountain, the river, the drained plain and the vanished lake in a single unbroken account.

In Central Java, Baru Klinting is mocked and turned away by a village, and plants a stick that none of them can pull out of the ground. When he pulls it out himself the water comes up after it, and the village is gone. Nyai Latung survives in a rice mortar because she was the one who fed him. The water that came up out of the hole is Rawa Pening, and people fish it and farm its margins today.

Eastward in Maluku a giant sailfish cuts its way through Romang, separates Black Island at Ivory Water, and knocks Maupora, Broken Island and Mosquito Island free — a chain of named coastal features delivered as a single itinerary. In the related Lüondona-Wietrili complex the sailfish destroys the land outright, scatters the inhabitants and leaves a remnant; Patrick Nunn has put coseismic subsidence forward as the physical frame for that one.

And in the Peninsula, Batin To’ Entah finds water under a jelutong stump, and a white river turtle comes out of it with an immense quantity of water behind. The great animals fail to kill the turtle; the mouse-deer succeeds. The released water is the sea. It is an origin of the sea, told in country that stands at the edge of the drowned Sunda Shelf, by people whose ancestors watched that sea arrive.

Two Sumatran traditions are dated, and so are kept off this map: smong on Simeulue, from the tsunami of 1907, and the Syair Lampung Karam, from Krakatau in 1883. They are worth naming anyway, because they show what a carried instruction can do. In 2004 the word smong emptied Simeulue’s coast, and the island lost a handful of people where its neighbours lost tens of thousands. A story held an order across a century and the order was obeyed.

That is what the rest of this map is doing, at longer range and on other subjects. The flood is the moment the terms were set. It gave the To Pebato the mice’s share of the harvest and the Riung the pig and the chicken paid in place of a body; it gave Seram its two moieties and named the Uliassers; it gave the Ifugao their valleys, the Bontoc their rough mountains, the Tinguian the fire in the bamboo, and Sumba the order in which sixteen domains were founded and are still held. Water took a world apart and handed back another, and the one it handed back is the one people are living in.

Mapped traditions