Page:Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje - The Achehnese - tr. Arthur Warren Swete O'Sullivan (1906).djvu/87

 each with a name of its own but without any collective appellation used to band themselves together in time of danger; and that at the time when the greatest efforts towards centralization of control were being made in Acheh, this confederacy obtained four imeums to look after their mosques and maintain their connection with the territorial rulers. Later on then, when this tribe had greatly increased in numbers and spread itself throughout every district, the name survived.

Many however take the view that the name points to an original quartet of tribes, united to one another in the same way and for the same reasons as the three sukèës first mentioned (Lhèë reutoïh, Ja Sandang and Ja Batèë). Such a supposition finds some support in the description of the Achehnese people as the seven kawōms or bangsas, which is to be met with occasionally in their literature. This expression however, the meaning of which even the most intelligent Achehnese declare themselves unable to understand, is just as likely to have originated in a totally different manner, nor have I met with any popular tradition according to which these "seven tribes" might be taken to be composed of four clans of the Imeum peuët and the other three tribes. Be this as it may, human memory discloses nothing with respect to this fourfold division, and if it ever did exist, the fusion is now quite complete.

The distribution into kawōms, even though not originally resting on a purely genealogical basis, afterwards obtained a genealogical significance, since the increase of each kawōm was due in the first place to natural propagation, and that too exclusively in the male line. Beyond all doubt there was nothing territorial in this distribution; for no matter where a man may choose to take up his abode, the bond which attaches him to his kawōm remains unsevered.

Still we may readily suppose that the kawōms were more or less territorially distinguished from one another by position, like the tribes of Israel or the Bedouins of Arabia both past and present. Indeed the instinct of mutual self-support that was unquestionably the weightiest factor in the formation of the kawōms, was most intimately connected with community of the place of abode.

Concentration was especially resorted to against threatened danger from the other clans; and it follows as a matter of course that there could be no community of residence with an enemy. A manifest survival of this separation of clans, which was undoubtedly much more