One of the things that would more surprise the linguist or anthropologist that toured around East Timor in 1974 or 1975, would be the diversity of languages and dialects spoken, as well as the variety of physical types and cultural traditions present in the island. The anthropologist António de Almeida, who by the end of 1974 was finishing another mission related to the construction of the East Timorese linguistic map, registered the existence of more than thirty languages and local dialects, with six different origins. In his later maps he signalled villages (small centres populated by one family or one clan) and knuas or sucos (small village groups where one tribe lived) with less than one hundred people that, among themselves, spoke one language completely different from the languages of the neighbouring communities.

These facts tell a lot, by themselves, not only about the ethnic and cultural diversity of the different Timorese peoples, but also about the reduced degree of alien influences that affected the less culturally influenced population of the interior of the territory, who kept alive and almost untouched their millenary ancestral traditions.

The compilation of stories, orally transmitted from generation to generation by the narrators of each tribe would certainly offer many useful information about the origins and the evolution of each of those tribes. Unfortunately, this work is almost non-existent, apart from exceptional cases, and today, after the human and cultural plundering provoked by the Indonesian invasion and occupation, the accomplishment of this work has been made almost impossible.

Still before the arrival of the European navigators to the islands of the archipelago - following the conquest of Malaca, in 1511, by Afonso de Albuquerque - it should be registered, for its enormous importance for Indonesia, the slow penetration of Islam.

From the 12th century onwards some Arab missionaries are reported to have been in the North of Sumatra. However, only after the conversion of the king of Malaca, in 1409, would the Achèh Kingdom convert to Islam, in the year 1416, in the Northeast of the island of Sumatra, becoming the first big Muslim Kingdom of the archipelago (after Samudra, by the end of the 13th century).

In the beginning of the century, when the Portuguese arrived to Insulindia, taking with them the catholic religion, a great part of Sumatra was already converted to Islam. The sultanate of Demaak, in the island of Java, had become, already, a centre of the propagation of Faith in Allah (mainly through the theatre).

In 1475 Islam starts to penetrate the Philippines. At the end of the 15th century it is the time of the King of South Kalimantan (Borneo) to become converted to the new religion, the same happening in 1495, to the King of Ternate, in the Mollucas. In 1526 the Kings of Bantam and of Jakarta, in the island of Java, were also converted, while in the interior of this and other islands a great part of the populations remained animist.

Due to its geographical location, away from the great commercial routes between China and India, between the islands with the spices and Malaya, Timor remained aside from the religious and cultural evolution that marked the islands of Sumatra, Java, Bali, Kalimantan (Borneo), Sulawesi (Celebes), the Philippines and the islands of Molucas themselves.

The island of Timor was, nonetheless, visited by Chinese traders from the very early days, and later, by Hindu-Buddhist and Muslim merchants. Apparently, the traders did not settle in the island, remaining there only the necessary time to close their businesses - mainly the purchase of sandal and its bargain for Chinese or Western products - and to arrange for their transportation.

When the first Portuguese navigators, merchants and missionaries arrived to Timor, they found populations that practised agriculture, knew metallurgy and used the iron, but they ignored the writing and kept faithful to their traditional animist practices.

The sandal business (and in some cases, the slaves business), will have contributed to the establishment of vaster kingdoms or small empires, just as Waiwiku-Wehale or Behale, established in the South-Balu plain.

Schulte Nordholt considers that, 'based not as much in conquest, but in ideas of spiritual precedence and in one complex alliance net, the influence of Wehale will have extended to more than two thirds of the island... Wehale, located in what is today called Indonesian Timor, was originally Tetum (Belunês), but its empire included smaller kingdoms from different ethnic groups, the Dawan or Atoni, the Bunaq, the Famak and others'.

The same author mentions three emperors that would be under the dependence of the Waiwiku-Wehale empire: - the South Belu liuriai, the Sonba'i (emperor of the majority of the Atoni region, in Western Timor), and the liuriai of Suai-Camenasse (of the Eastern Timor Belu region). Other authors consider that the kingdoms of Timor constituted, then, two groups: Servião, in the West, and Behale or Belos, to the East.

This was probably the situation that the Portuguese found, when they arrived to Timor, in approximately 1515.

According to Afonso de Castro the Timorese 'had settled in cultivable lands;; the tribe had transformed itself in village and the village had established relations with neighbouring ones, becoming a state, but with all the elements that constitute a Nation'.

The populations of Timor, much diverse in languages and cultures, had nonetheless, a social structure relatively similar. This, very much stratified, had the king or liuriai at the top of the hierarchy, datos (or nobles) directing the fate of the sucos or groups of small population agglomerates, and then several classes of population, with the slaves at the basis of the pyramid. Witch-doctors, quack salvers and story tellers (the living libraries of the tribes) performed a relevant role. And because neither Hinduism, nor Christianity, nor Islam had penetrated Timor, the women occupied, in many cases, a place of considerable weight, enjoying a freedom that would be the envy of the European women of those times. This in spite of the practice of polygamy and the significance of the barlaque, institution that regulated the marriages and that dominated all the social and economic relations inside and between tribes.

Porto, 24th October, 1994

A. Barbedo de Magalhães