Page:Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje - The Achehnese - tr. Arthur Warren Swete O'Sullivan (1906).djvu/51

 and judicial systems and family life as they subsist at the present time. In these we can easily discover some traces of the centralizing activity of one or two powerful princes, an important measure of influence exercised by Islam and a still more important basis of indigenous adat law.

It must be borne in mind that even the most primitive societies and the laws that govern them never remain stationary. Keeping this in view it becomes easy to trace here and there efforts after change, and elsewhere again institutions which have already passed into disuse and owe their continued existence in a rudimentary form simply to the force of human conservatism. This makes us careful in forming judgments as to the antiquity of any given institution taken by itself, as we are not fully acquainted with the factors which may in earlier times have exercised a modifying influence. Still we are able with one glance over the whole existing customary law of Acheh to assert without fear of error that the institutions of that country do not date from yesterday but that, (disregarding alterations in details), they have in all main essentials existed for centuries past.

In Acheh we have to deal, not with an originally powerful monarchy which gradually split up into small parcels, but with a number of little states barely held together by the community of origin of their citizens and the nominal supremacy of the port-king. We must obviously therefore, in describing the political fabric of Acheh, work upwards from below; and as in that country all authority of the higher classes over the lower is exceedingly limited, we must first devote our attention to the people who inhabit Great Acheh.

We have at our disposal no single historical datum from which we can deduce any likely conclusion as to the origin of the Achehnese. We can only allege on various grounds that it must have been of a very mixed description.