Early history of Gowa and Talloq

Early history of Gowa and Talloq

Makassar kingdom of Gowa emerged around 1300 CE as one of many agrarian chiefdoms in the Indonesian peninsula of South Sulawesi. From the sixteenth century onward, Gowa and its coastal ally Talloq became the first powers to dominate most of the peninsula. The history of Gowas and Talloqs is described in the chronicle ‘The Gowa Chronicles’ by Francis David Bulbeck and Ian Caldwell.

About Early history of Gowa and Talloq in brief

Summary Early history of Gowa and TalloqMakassar kingdom of Gowa emerged around 1300 CE as one of many agrarian chiefdoms in the Indonesian peninsula of South Sulawesi. From the sixteenth century onward, Gowa and its coastal ally Talloq became the first powers to dominate most of the peninsula. The early history of the kingdom has been analyzed as an example of state formation. The most important historical sources for precolonial Makassar are the pioloangicles or Gowa Chronicle. The chronicles are written to describe the rulers of both communities, but at the same time they contain a general description of the development of the Gowa dynasty from the origin of the dynasties to their unification to the early seventeenth century of Indonesia. There is no chronological order of the chronicles, and each section is not necessarily called around the reigning monarchs, and the writing is not chronatically arranged around the reigns of each monarch. The Makassars are considered to be the most important powers in eastern Indonesia in the early Seventeenth century, when they became the most powerful kingdom in the region. The population may have grown by as much as tenfold between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, while new types of crops, clothes, and furniture were introduced into daily life. Despite limited influence from the Javanese empire of Majapahit on certain coastal kingdoms and the introduction of an Indic script in the 15th century, early civilization in South SulAWesi appears to have been, in the words of historian Ian Caldwell, ‘largely unconnected to foreign technologies and ideas.’ The development of early civilization was based on indigenous, ‘Austronesian’ categories of social and political thought, and can be contrasted with other Indonesian societies with extensive Indian cultural influence.

The culture of pre-Islamic Gowa can be compared to that of the Philippine chiefdoms and Polynesian societies, which were based on ‘indigenous’ and ‘Indonesian’ concepts of culture and language. The history of Gowas and Talloqs is described in the chronicle ‘The Gowa Chronicles’ by Francis David Bulbeck and Ian Caldwell in their book ‘Gowas,’ which is published by Simon & Schuster, Inc. The Gowa chronicles date from the six century onwards and the Talloqu chronicles from the 16th century onwards. It is not known whether Gowa was still a state when it became a state in the 17th century or if it was replaced by the modern state of Jakarta in the 18th century. It has been suggested that Gowa may have been a complex chiefdom to a state society in the mid-twenties, but this is not a unanimously held position. The kingdom continued to grow in wealth and administrative complexity until the end of the 19th century when it was conquered by the Kingdom of Selayar. Gowa’s sphere of influence reached a territorial extent unprecedented in Sulawesi history, from Minahasa to Selayer.