Some seven thousand years ago the caves of Perak were
inhabited by people who used pal eoliths, namely stone scrapers and coup-de-poing in almond-shaped, oval and
elongated forms, painted their bodies with a red pigment, used grinding slabs
and pounding stones and fed on fresh-water and marine mollusks. The relics of
this civilisation are associated not only with roughly shaped stone-implements
of a type found in Sumatra having one side chipped and the other in its natural
water-worn condition but also with proto-neoliths or artifacts chipped but
having polished edges. The evidence points to the diffusion of palaeolithic
civilisation using implements of the Sumatra type through the south-eastern
parts of Asia and as far as Sumatra. It has been traced in Perak at
rock-shelters at Goa Kajang near Lenggong and at Gunong Pondok. Scientific
excavation at Gunong Pondok discovered no pottery in the lower layers. Pottery
plain and cord-marked was associated with the later protoneolithic remains. The
makers of the protoneoliths, chipped artefacts with only edges polished, may
have learnt the art of polishing on bone and horn or from contact with a neolithic
people. So far as is known as yet, the mixed palaeolithic and protoneolithic
culture of the Perak caves did not reach Sumatra, though it occurs in Siam,
Borneo and Luzon: from the abundance of its relics at Bak-son in northern
Tonkin it has been called the Bacsonian civilisation.
In remains of a neolithic civilisation when tools completely
polished took the place of chipped palaeoliths Perak is rich. Specimens of West
Indonesian types such as occur in Sumatra and Bali have been unearthed in the
rice-fields and mines of Kinta and Larut and on the bank of the Bernam river at
Tanjong Malim. This neolithic civilisation has been ascribed to the second millennium
B.C.
Though there is still need of further data to complete the chain of evidence the surmise has been
hazarded that the older palaeolithic civilisation of the Perak caves may have
been that of continental ancestors of the modern Papuans and that polishing may
have been introduced by Indonesian tribes. This tentative surmise is based on
the evidence of skulls from the caves of Tonkin.*
A civilisation apparently associated with river-banks
produced in Perak graves built of granite slabs. These graves have been
unearthed at Changkat Mantri on the Bernam River, and at Sungai
*On a trouve, rien qu'en Indo-Chine, des cranes de race
melane'sienne, indonesienne, australoid et negrito, c'est a dire de quatre
races differentes. Mais de la quoi de plus probable aussi, que ce n'est bien
pas dans une famille, mais meme dans plusieures families de langues, qu'on
pourrait arriver un jour a grouper les parlers de cette partie de L'Asie, c'est
a dire que ce n'est pas une mais plusieures
families austro-asiatiques auxquelles on pourrait aboutir." Une Fausse Famille Linguistique "L'
Austro-Asiatique." G. de Hevesy. Ill Congres International des
Linguistes, Rome 1933.
3
Page 4 A History of Perak.
Kruit off the Sungkai River, while another is recorded from
the Slim River:—one of them has been rebuilt in the garden of Taiping Museum.
These cists are closely related to the dolmen and are of a type not uncommon in
Java where they extend from a late neolithic to an iron age:—the Philippines,
also, have tombs said to be of a similar type. With the Perak cists have been
found iron socketted tools, cornelian beads, stone pounders, rough pottery and
bronze utensils. These iron tools have also been unearthed at Klang in
Selangor, on the Tembeling in Pahang, at Tanjong Rambutan and Sengat in Kinta
and at Bengkong in Batang Padang.
Later still in the iron-age comes the Indian settlement near
Kuala Selinsing. Along this beach have been picked up hundreds of cornelian,
glass (or paste) and shell beads, portions of bracelets in stone and in blue
green glass, some pottery and cross-hatched pottery stamps. The commonest types
of glass-beads are opaque yellow, opaque blue, opaque green, clear blue, clear
yellow, dark red, and orange paste with dark-red striations. One type has
" a core of non-translucent yellowish paste, plated with gold-leaf which
is covered with clear yellow glass." Parti-coloured beads thought to be of
Indian type have been found in an East-Java dolmen, and beads of most of the
Selinsing types occur in Philippine graves of the iron-age and at Santubong in
Sarawak and glass-beads on Papan Island off Borneo. A gold ornament possibly of
the late Majapahit period, possibly much earlier, was unearthed at Selinsing
and in a hole left by the roots of a fallen tree a cornelian seal engraved with
the words Sri Vishnuvarmmasya, in Pallava characters of the 7th century A.D. or
later. The Selinsing settlement, therefore, was an Indian trading station like
others with Pallava inscriptions, Taruma in West Java and Kutai in Borneo. Sri
Vijaya used Nagari or north Indian characters but it may have swept over a
Pallava Selinsing and left no trace. Perhaps in the eleventh century A.D. it
was sacked by the Chola raids on Srivijaya and her dependencies: raids to which
the " Malay Annals " seem to
allude in the account of the conquest by a " Raja Suran " of
Gangganegara " situate on a hill very steep in front and low behind, whose
fort still exists inland at the Dindings, a little above the Perak." The
name recalls the Ganga-Pallavas.
Thirty years ago in a mine at Tanjong Rambutan was dug up a
little bronze Buddha* of the Gupta type. In 1931 there were found at Pengkalan
near Ipoh a bronze throne for a seated figure and a very beautiful standing
bronze Buddha (Pl. II),* apparently of the earlier Gupta school though Dutch
scholars opine that its date is about 750 A.D. and that it is a specimen of
Srivijaya work similar to one found in the Palembang river.
* From photographs, Prof. G. Coedes (discoverer of Srivijaya)
surmises that both are of the Gupta school. There is a poor illustration of the
Tanjong Rambutan Buddha in " Twentieth Century Impressions of British
Malaya ": it is in the possession of Mr. Alma Baker, C.B.E., formerly of
Batu Gajah.
Early Civilisations and Primitive Tribes. Page 5
Among the human remains found in Kuala Selinsing have been
identified Negrito and Proto-Malayan elements. The Negrito is a small, very
dark bullet-headed frizzy-haired individual called in Kedah and Upper Perak a
Semang. He is thought to be related not only to the Aetas of the Philippines
for whom Spanish writers invented the name Negrito but also to the Mincopies of
the Andamans. The Semang are a very primitive people, nomadic, using only
wall-less leaf-shelters propped on sticks, ignorant of agriculture and
boat-making and subsisting on fruits and wild game. Unfortunately in the 1931
Census no attempt was made to discriminate between them and their more numerous
neighbours the Sakai but they are all to be found in Kedah, Perak, Kelantan and
Trang and the fact that they live on the northern outskirt of the big Sakai
wedge, inhabit swamps and have hardly invaded the mountains suggests that they
may have migrated to the Peninsula at a later date than the less primitive
Sakai.
Perak is pre-eminently the house of the fairer wavy-haired
long-headed Sakai who are now thought to be of Nesiot (Indonesian) stock with
admixture of Negrito blood in the north and Proto-Malay blood in the south and
some very early Proto-Australoid and Papuo-Malanesoid strain. The Nesiot is a
typical hill breed, akin to numerous hill tribes in Indochina and the Malay
Archipelago. The older more primitive elements occur in tribes inhabiting the
foot-hills and persisting up the main tributary valleys of Perak and Kelantan.
The Perak tribes have been divided into the Northern Sakai of Kuala Kangsar and
the Central Sakai of Batang Padang. The Sakai language has Mon-Khmer
affinities. Their weapon is the blow-pipe. They live in well-built pile houses
and plant sugar, millet, tobacco, plantains and hill-rice. Some 20,000 in
number, they enter no more than the Negritos into the real life of Perak,
though in some districts the Malay shows traces of Sakai and Semang blood.
Malay borrowings from the aborigines are few. With the Malay
liking for a matrilineal title to land, Perak legend introduces a negrito girl
and her bamboo-born daughter as owners of the land of Perak but with
patriarchal inconsistency leaves the mother childless and the daughter a virgin
saint. The sword or dagger of office presented to Perak chiefs bears the name
of baur, a Sakai word for "
staff." In the name of one of Perak's guardian genies occurs the Sakai
word alak meaning "
shaman," and there are aboriginal elements in the Perak medium's seance (berhantu).
This, then, was the stage set for the coming of the Malacca
Malays, an interior peopled by the remnants of primitive races that had passed
centuries before down to the Malay Archipelago, a country so noted for tin that
it had attracted bronze-workers from India, a coast with foreign Hindu settlers
exploiting the aborigines.
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