The Savaeans and possible Egyptian influences in Indonesia
H.G. Quaritch Wales published this article in 1950 in the Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, arguing that Sabaean traders may have carried a small number of Egyptian cultural traits—most notably the Horus emblem and associated sun-worship—into Java, where they persisted beneath the surface of Hinduized religion and re-emerged as Hindu influence waned. The piece is an early instalment of the broader diffusionist programme that would later be developed in his monograph The Making of Greater India.
Summary
The article grows out of Sir Roland Braddell’s 1947 notes on ancient Mediterranean beads found in Malaya, possibly dating to around 700 B.C. Wales accepts Braddell’s premise that Sabaean maritime contacts with the Malay world are plausible, and then extends the argument by drawing on the work of Wm. Stutterheim, who in 1925 and 1929 identified signs on Central Javanese temples (Barabudur, Sewu) as resembling Sabaean script, and who argued that the characteristic Javanese solar cult and its associated iconography—the sun-eye, nagas, and wings—were derived from the Egyptian Horus symbol of Edfu. Wales endorses this identification while correcting Stutterheim’s tendency to overstate the extent of Egyptian influence, noting that many features superficially appearing Egyptian were more probably of Babylonian or Sumerian origin, transmitted overland with megalithic culture waves.
The core of the argument rests on a negative as much as a positive case. Wales demonstrates that no comparable tendency toward sun-worship or modification of the kala-head exists in any of the continental Greater Indian civilizations, nor among non-Indianized peoples of continental South-east Asia. This absence, he contends, rules out the hypothesis that the solar cult entered Java via the well-attested overland megalithic routes, and instead points to a maritime vector—namely the Sabaeans, who according to Hitti monopolized Indian Ocean trade in the last millennium and a quarter B.C. and who, being themselves under Egyptian influence, were equipped to transmit such traits. He also dismantles Mlle. Colani’s 1938 claim of a solar cult in continental South-east Asia, reinterpreting the Dong-So’n bronze drums as depicting the Pole Star and the cult of the dead rather than solar worship, and showing that Colani’s comparison of drum motifs with the ecliptic inadvertently credits the Dongsonians with modern heliocentric astronomy.
Wales situates his conclusion within the wider diffusionist framework then emerging: Heine-Geldern’s 1949 exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History on India-to-South America diffusion, and Hutton’s 1946 paper on Malayo-Polynesian cultural transmission to West Africa. In this context, Sabaean contacts with Malaya represent one more strand in a network of ancient maritime communication whose claims to actuality were, in Wales’s view, becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
Key Findings
- Stutterheim (1925, 1929) identified signs on Barabudur, Sewu, and other Central Javanese temples as resembling Sabaean script, predating the Indian-based Javanese writing system (pp. 36–37).
- The Horus emblem—composed of a sun-eye (kala-head reduced to a single eye), nagas, and wings—appears in modified form on temple doorways from the Central Javanese period through the Majapahit period, and in the gunungan (shadow-play introduction piece) (pp. 37–39).
- At Chandi Sawentar the wings are placed “almost surreptitiously” beside naga balustrades; at the early mosque of Sendang Duhur they spread boldly from the gate sides, indicating a progressive reassertion of the solar cult after centuries of Hindu repression (p. 38).
- No comparable sun-worship or kala-head modification is found in any continental Greater Indian civilization or among non-Indianized continental South-east Asian peoples—a categorical absence that Wales treats as decisive against an overland megalithic transmission route (pp. 39–40).
- The Dong-So’n bronze drums, previously interpreted by Mlle. Colani as evidence of solar worship, are reinterpreted by Wales as depicting the Pole Star with the plane of the dead circulating around it, consistent with Assyrio-Babylonian planetary cosmology rather than a solar cult (pp. 41–42).
- The devaraja (royal linga) cult, known in 8th-century Java, was pushed into the background by the rising sun-worship and only re-emerged at Chandi Sukuh at the close of the Majapahit period, when it was already returning to its basic megalithic form (pp. 40–41).
Conclusion
Wales concludes that the hypothesis best covering the available evidence is that a small number of concrete, readily assimilated Egyptian traits—specifically the Horus emblem and its associated solar theology—were introduced into Java by Sabaean traders acting as a third party with only superficial acquaintance with Egyptian culture. He explicitly rejects the notion of a wholesale Egyptian cultural pattern, and frames the Sabaean hypothesis as one element within a broader picture of ancient maritime diffusion whose evidential weight was, by 1950, becoming “increasingly insistent.”
Context
- The article draws on Stutterheim’s unpublished and published observations of Javanese temple iconography, Aichele’s 1927 study of the gunungan, and the critical responses of Rassers (1931) and Hidding (1931), none of which are reproduced here but which Wales promises to address in full in his forthcoming monograph.
- Historiographically, the piece represents the high-water mark of the diffusionist school in South-east Asian studies just before the discipline’s post-war turn toward indigenous development models; Wales’s categorical statements (e.g., the absence of sun-worship in continental South-east Asia) and his reliance on typological comparison of motifs rather than independent verification of transmission routes mark it as a product of that earlier paradigm.