Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 18.djvu/794

* SUMATRA. 692 SUMEBIAN LANGUAGE. Achin, the first containing one-lialf the people of the island. Sumatra has a Governor (under the Governor-General of the East Indies), a President, Coniptroller, etc. The 8 administrative districts are called residences. The Residency of Rhio in- cludes several hundred islands off the east coast. A Government railway extends from Padang to the great coal mines in the adjacent interior. There is a railway from Medan to the coast, and one will operate from Achin along the northern coast. In 1900 Sumatra had 200 miles of rail- way. There are many good roads in various coast districts, and there is now a fair roadway from Palembang to Benkulen. Padang, Achin, Dili, Benkulen, and Palembang are the leading towns. The population of Sumatra exceeds 3,000,000. The Europeans number about 6000, and the Chinese about 100,000. The natives of Su- matra, exclusive of the intruding Hindus, Arabs, Tamils, Indo-Chinese, and Chinese, belong to the Malayan stock, linguistically and physi- cally, although some authorities group as 'In- donesians' such peoples as the Battaks and a few others. Among the most important and most interesting tribes are the Achinese of the ex- treme northwest, noted for their long struggle against the Dutch, the Battaks of the northern interior and northwest coast, and their neighbors in the Xias and Batu Islands, the Kubus, a very primitive people of the forests and niarshj' re- gions of Palembang, the so-called Menangkabau JIalays of the middle of the island and other parts east and west, the Palembangs, Redjargs, Passumahs, Lampongs, and other tribes to the soutlij and the Abongs. The Malaj'an people of Sumatra exhibit many varieties of culture, from that of the forest-dwelling Kubus and other tribes of a primitive sort to those who under Hindu, and centuries later under Mo- hammedan influences, reached a considerable de- gree of culture, with religious and conunereial as well as political development and expansion. The first intrusions of Hindu life and culture into Sumatra began some time before the Chris- tian Era. Traces of Hinduism are evident in architecture, religion, and language. It was in all proliability from Java that Buddhism in the sixth century made its way into Sumatra, where, however, it never obtained general vogue. The Battaks. some of whose divinities bear corrupted Indian names, possess an alphabet of Hindu origin. Hindu influences were probably at their height in the eighth century. From the thir- teenth to the fifteenth century Mohammedan in- fluences ])revailed and many of the tribes were converted to Islam., and a number of sultanates were established. The Mohanuuedan influence upon politics, religion, and language was great. Since then the various European conquerors and intruders (Portuguese. English. Dutch) have made themselves felt, but chiefly in the coast regions. A considerable portion of the interior is still only nominally subject to the rule of the Dutch. On the whole the native population of Sumatra, as is also the case in .Java, is on the increase. Mohammedanism is generally pro- fessed in the coast districts and also to a great extent in the interior. ■Marco Polo visited Sumatra in 1292, and the first Portuguese in 1508. In the seventeenth century the Dutch obtained a firm foothold, hav- ing forced out the Portuguese. From 1812 to 1810 the English held the island. In 1825 Ben- kulen, where the English had been established for nearly a century and a half, was transferred to the Dutch. The conquest of the natives has been in progress since the discovery of the island, and has not yet been entirely completed. The Sultan of Achin, in the northwest, with whom a war has been going on since 1873, has especial- ly proved troublesome. Consult: Verbeek, Topoyraphische en geolog- ischc heschrijving van een gedeelte van Sumatras u-estkust (The Hague, 188G) ; Forbes, A Natural- ist's Wanderings in the Eastern Archipelago (London, 1887); Carthaus, Aus dem Reich von InsuUnde. Sumatra und der Malaiische Archipel (Leipzig, 1891); Keane, Eastern Geography (London, 1887) ; Brenner, Besuch bei den Kan- nihaJen tiumutras (Wurzburg, 1894) ; Miquel, Flora. Sumatrana (London, n. d.) ; Werner, "Reptilien und Batrachier aus Sumatra." in Zoo- logisches Jahrbuch, vol. xiii. (.Jena, 1900) ; Breit- enstein, t^uinatra (Leipzig. 1902) ; Giesenhagen, Auf Java und Sumatra (ib., 1902). SUMBA, .s<5o!m'ba, or S.4ndalwood Island. One of the Sunda Islands (q.v.). SUMBAWA, sum-ba'wa. An island of the Dutch East Indies, one of the Sunda group, sit- uated between Java and Flores. It is separated by Atlas Strait from Lombok on the west and by Sapi Strait from Komodo and Flores on the east (Jlap: East India Islands, E 6). Its area is given as 4300 square miles by some authorities, and as high as 5400 by others. Four mountain ranges traverse Sumbawa from west to east, the northern being volcanic, the southern containing a limestone formation. Mid-Sumbawa is a region of circular hills of lava and tufa, and the land is covered with a long silver-colored grass. The natives engage in agriculture. Sumbawa, with its four free States, is included, for the adminis- trative purposes of the Dutch, under Residency No. XI. of Insulinde or Island India. The popu- lation is put as low as 75,000 and as high as 150,000, nearly all Mohammedan Malays. There are about 12.000 foreigners, who control the trade. SUMEBIAN LANGUAGE. The language supposed to have been spoken by the non-Semitic inhabitants of the Euphrates valley who were gradually absorbed by the invading Babylonians. This language, according to the view of a ma- jority of Assyriologists, has been preserved in a number of insci'iptions. The first successful decipherers of the cuneiform characters. Hincks, Rawlinson, and Oppert, observed that the wedge- shaped signs were employed in writing languages not akin to the Assyrian, that the inventors of this system of writing cannot have been Semites, since the signs have syllabic values and some characteristic Semitic sounds are not represented, and that one of these languages was used in Babylonia itself. Hincks thought that these languages were Aryan; Rawlinson regarded them as Scythian, meaning by this term Mongolian; Oppert considered the Babylonian non-Semitic tongue as Kasdo-Scythian. The term 'Accadian' was first used by Rawlinson in 1855, the terra 'Siimerian' by Oppert in 18(i9. There was prac- tical imanimity among all Assyriologists before 1874 as to the agglutinating and non-Semitic character of this language. In that year, how- ever. Halevy began his protest against the very