Luwu

The Kingdom of Luwu (also Luwuq or Wareq) is the oldest kingdom in South Sulawesi. In 1889, the Dutch Governor of Makassar placed Luwu’s heyday between the 10th and 14th centuries, but offered no evidence. The La Galigo, an epic poem in an archaic form of the lontara language, is the likely source of Braam Morris’ dating. The La Galigo depicts a vaguely defined world of coastal and riverine kingdoms whose economies are based on trade. The important centers of this world are Luwu and the kingdom of Cina (pronounced Cheena but identical in Indonesian pronunciation to China), which lay in the western Cenrana valley, with its palace centre near the hamlet of Sarapao in Pamanna district. The incompatibility of the La Galigo’s society and political economy with the reality of the Bugis agricultural kingdoms led Bugis historians to propose an intervening period of chaos to separate the two chronologically.

Archaeological and textual research carried out since the 1980s has undermined this chronology. Extensive surveys and excavations in Luwu have revealed that it is no older than the earliest agricultural kingdoms of the southwest peninsula. The new understanding is that Bugis speaking settlers from the western Cénrana valley began to settle along the coastal margins around the year 1300. The Gulf of Bone is not a Bugis-speaking area: it is a thinly populated region of great ethnic diversity. Speakers of Pamona, Padoe, Toala, Wotu and Lemolang languages live on the coastal lowlands and foothills, while the highland valleys are home to groups speaking various other Central and South Sulawesi languages. The Bugis are found almost solely along the coast, to which they have evidently migrated in order to trade with Luwu’s indigenous peoples. It is clear both from archaeological and textual sources that Luwu was a Bugis-led coalition of various ethnic groups, united by trading relationships.

Luwu’s political economy was based on the smelting of iron ore brought down, via the Lémolang-speaking polity of Baebunta, to Malangke on the central coastal plain. Here the smelted iron was worked into weapons and agricultural tools and exported to the rice-growing southern lowlands. This brought the kingdom great wealth, and by the 14th century Luwu had become the feared overlord of large parts of the southwest and southeast peninsula. The first ruler for which we have any real information was Dewaraja (ruled c. 1495-1520). Stories current today in South Sulawesi tell of his aggressive attacks on the neighboring kingdoms of Wajo and Sidenreng. Luwu’s power was eclipsed in the 16th century by the rising power of the southern agrarian kingdoms, and its military defeats are set out in the Chronicle of Bone.

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