The lands west of the lakes: the history of Ajattappareng, South Sulawesi, AD 1200 to 1600

The period AD 1200-1600 was a time of great change in South Sulawesi, which saw the rise and development of the major kingdoms that came to dominate the political landscape in later centuries. The advent of regular external trade with other parts of the Indonesian archipelago from about 1300, and its increase in subsequent centuries, provided the major stimulus for the rise and development of the Bugis and Makasar kingdoms. Rice appears to have been the major product that the lowland kingdoms of South Sulawesi exchanged with foreign traders, and the demand for this appears to have stimulated a major expansion and intensification of wet-rice agriculture.In this thesis I focus on five South Sulawesi kingdoms, collectively known as Ajattappareng. Through a combination of oral, textual, archaeological, linguistic and geographical sources, I explore their rise and development from about 1200 to the beginning of the seventeenth century, when the Makasar kingdom of Goa defeated and Islamised the neighbouring Bugis kingdoms.I also present an inquiry into oral traditions of a historical nature in South Sulawesi, encompassing their functions, processes of transmission and transformation, their uses in writing history and their relationship with the written register. I argue that any distinction between oral and written traditions of a historical nature is largely irrelevant, and that oral and written information collectively make up a large corpus of knowledge that can be recalled, or referenced, whenever the need may arise. I also argue that the South Sulawesi chronicles, which can be found for a few kingdoms only, are an anomaly in the corpus of indigenous South Sulawesi historical sources