SEA-007 - museum specimen
Rote (Roti)
Indonesia - Southwest Rote island (off SW Timor), Nusa Tenggara Timur - Island Southeast Asia
Play / practical
babak
Recorded as the Rote (Roti) name for this bamboo bull-roarer; its literal sense is not documented in the museum record. (Standard Indonesian babak, meaning "act" or "round," is a separate word and almost certainly not the local meaning here.)
A bamboo bull-roarer, a slat just under 25 centimetres long strung on a cord, collected on the southwest coast of Rote (Roti), the small island off the southwest end of Timor. It was acquired in 1935 by Alfred Buhler, then a Basel commercial-school teacher commissioned by the city's ethnographic museum to document the crafts and material culture of Timor, Rote and Flores. The piece carries the local name babak, and the collection card answers for its use in two words: Kinderspielzeug — a child's plaything.
Schwirrholz. Kinderspielzeug.
Bull-roarer. Children's toy.
Museum der Kulturen Basel cached card, IIc 3837
- Object
- Bamboo bull-roarer (slat with cord), L 24.6cm, collected on SW Rote by the Buhler expedition 1935 (Museum der Kulturen Basel, acc. IIc 3837).
- Function
- A child's toy: the collection card sets down "Schwirrholz. Kinderspielzeug." — bull-roarer, children's plaything.
- Map confidence
- high - approximate territory centroid (mining 2026)
- Source location
- MKB IIc 3837; site/bullroarer/assets/objects/MINE2026-017.jpg
- Toy / secular survival