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History

"Bali is neither a last nor a lost paradise, but the home of a peculiarly gifted people of mixed race, endowed with a great sense of humour and a great sense of style—and with a suppleness of mind which has enabled them to take what they want of alien civilisations which have been reaching them for centuries and to leave the rest."

Beryle De Zoete and Walter Spies,

Dance and Drama in Bali, 1938

Bali, around 1720, as depicted by Dutch cartographers. Photograph courtesy of Antiques of the Orient.

As a pearl develops from a single gritty core, so Bali's culture has grown from a nugget of indigenous belief, on to which has been slowly layered centuries of Javanese, Buddhist and Hindu civilisation. This grafting on of alien civilisation to animist beliefs has given us the Balinese culture which we know today.

As early as several centuries before the birth of Christ the island is thought to have been populated by herders and farmers, people who used bronze and iron to make implements and jewellery—early grave sites found in the mountains have revealed ancient stone seats and altars, as well as coffins sculpted in the shape of giant turtles. Certainly these people engaged in some form of ancestor worship, but beyond that little is known about Bali's first inhabitants, except that they were probably descended from migrants who moved south from Yunnan in China over a period of several thousand years BC.

Goa Gajah, the 11th-century elephant cave, so-called because reliefs carved around its mouth were at first thought to resemble elephant ears. The cave is thought to have been created during the period of Bali's first contact with the Hindu and Buddhist population of Java.

Today some Balinese communities still claim ancestry from those early migrants. Called Bali Aga, or Bali Asli, they continue to live in villages isolated and independent from the general island system. These clans—one based in Trunyan on the shores of Lake Batur, another in Tenganan close to Candi Dasa, and the third at Sembiran on the northern coast near Tejakula—maintain a mountain aloofness from their fellow Balinese that sometimes borders on the brusque. The Tenganan clan still forbids marriage outside the village, a ruling which seems destined to ensure their gradual demise; the one at Trunyan shuns the conventional cremation rites of the rest of Bali and instead leaves the bodies of its dead to decompose on a ceremonial hillside next to Lake Batur.

Of the few clues to the island's early pre-history perhaps the most noteworthy is the "Moon of Pejeng", a huge bronze gong now enshrined in a temple at Pejeng near Gianyar. Still considered to have living power, this magnificent two-metre long kettle-drum is decorated with frogs and geometric motifs that probably originated from an area around Dongson, in northern Vietnam. Again, no-one really knows how the drum arrived in Bali, or when—yet the Balinese believe it to be a thing of magic, one of the subangs, or decorative ear plugs of the moon. Long ago, according to local lore, the subang fell to earth and disturbed some thieves. One of them, braver than the rest, climbed the tree where the subang had been caught and urinated over it to try to extinguish its bright light. The thing promptly exploded, killing the thief, and fell to earth in its present shape.

Funeral temples cut into the rock at Gunung Kawi, a complex of royal monuments dating from the 11th century. The site is thought to be connected to the East Javanese King Airlangga, who was of Balinese descent.

Fountains at Goa Gajah, which was discovered by archaeologists in 1923.

Rock reliefs at Yeh Pulu, dating from the 14th century. Close by is a sacred well, but little is known about the carvings.

The Bale Kambang floating pavilion in front of the old palace at Kerta Gosa, Bali's former centre of justice. The palace was also the site for the mass ritual suicide during conflict with the Dutch colonialists in 1908.