[Sarawak Gazette . vol. cxviii, no. 1517, Sept. 1991, pp. 29-32.]
Satyrs
and the People With Tails:
A Possible Reference
to
Borneo in Ptolemy's Geography?
by Otto Steinmayer,
Universiti Malaya.
[E-mail me / Otto Steinmayer's Homepage]
Claudius
Ptolemy was a mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, and geographer who
lived
and worked in Alexandria in Egypt, then the center of western learning,
around
the first half of the 2nd century A.D. One of Ptolemy's several
major works is
his Geography, the most
systematic
account of the whole world then known to anybody, west or east.
Rummaging
around the library at Universiti Malaya, as I often do, I came across a
beautiful facsimile of a Latin translation of Ptolemy's Geography printed in 1478, among the first books
printed in
Europe. I opened his atlas to the map of "Asia beyond India," hoping he
might
shown some detail of my favorite island, Borneo.
Where
Borneo should be, there in the middle of the sea to the south and east
of
Malaya, Ptolemy drew a group of three islands and labelled them the
"Islands of
the Satyrs." A brief note in the text says: "Those who inhabit these
islands
are said to have tails, such as the ones they paint of satyrs."[1]
Ptolemy's
coordinates for the Islands of the Satyrs, when they are adjusted
according to
true values, put them some 9° to the east, and 2 1/2° to the
south of the tip
of the Malay peninsula, or on modern maps somewhere in West Kalimantan.[2]
So,
Borneo? I have no intention here of trying to prove that! The evidence
Ptolemy
and others left to us is so patently patchy (how, for example, did
Ptolemy
manage to describe the Malay Peninsula but miss the huge island of
Sumatra, a
mere stone's throw over the Straits of Malacca?) that we modern
scholars hardly
dare assert the least thing about his knowledge of S.E. Asia. Yet in Ptolemy's tiny account of the
Islands of the Satyrs I detect the faint echo of one true piece of
information
on Borneo wildlife, and the clang of one famous Borneo tall story.
Ptolemy
probably never travelled very far from home. He must have based his map
on
information from travelers and earlier books, working out coordinates
from
lengths of voyages and ships' courses. Navigators without compass,
chronometer,
or log—without anything but the stars and the sun—must necessarily
have come up with extremely rough estimates, and that is what Ptolemy's
precise-seeming tables of latitude and longitude are. Ptolemy further
made the
mistake of choosing Posidonius's wrong estimate of the earth's size.
(Eratosthenes' was much closer to the truth. Columbus also made the
same error,
some say on purpose.) And so the errors add up and render his figures
very
approximate.[3]
It
seemed to me that the best way of describing how Ptolemy might have
worked was
to dramatize it in the following sketch: SCENE: A tavern, or shop, or
something
in a port anywhere from East Africa to India sometime in the early 2nd
century
A.D. A GREEK SEA CAPTAIN is talking with a SAILOR of Indian or perhaps
Malay
race.
CAPTAIN:
I myself have been as far as Takola in the Golden
Chersonese.
SAILOR:
Huh? Oh, you mean [whatever the local name was.]
CAPTAIN:
Er, I guess that's how they said it. Tell me, how far
further east have you been?
SAILOR: Me?
Well, my friend said he once sailed about __ days
east from the southern part of the peninsula. The sun was a little on
his left
hand. He got to a bunch of islands close together. Couldn't see what
lay behind
them, he approached straight from the sea, couldn't see no coast. There
was
muddy water like river water there, but all he tasted was salt. Pretty
empty
place. He stayed there only a few days. Not much in the way of trade
that you'd
be interested in Somebody showed
him a big animal, looked like a really ugly man, all covered in red
hair with a
stupid face. [CAPTAIN thinks, "satyr?" remembering a farce he once saw
in
Aphrodisias.] He said he got it out of the forest. This guy also said
that up
in the hills there are people who have tails, and he said he'd bring
one of
them to the market, but my friend had to leave before he saw it.
CAPTAIN:
Really?
*
MANY YEARS LATER, in
Claudius Ptolemy's house in Alexandria. The place is cluttered with
papyri,
rulers, compasses, books and a globe. Ptolemy is talking with yet
another GREEK
SEA CAPTAIN.
PTOLEMY: So, how
far did your friend say his friend said these islands were from the tip
of the
Golden Chersonese?
CAPTAIN:
About __ days' sail, sir. [Ptolemy makes a note on a
wax tablet.]
PTOLEMY:
Hm hm. And what bearing?
CAPTAIN [guesses]:
Er, ESE.
PTOLEMY: And
what were these islands like?
CAPTAIN: Well
he weren't too clear, sir, but I'd reckon from
his description that there were about three of them, pretty close
together,
with a channel in between.
PTOLEMY:
Anything else he told you about them?
CAPTAIN:
My friend's friend said that satyrs lived there, and
also people with tails.
PTOLEMY:
Thank my good man. Here's something for your trouble.
[exit Captain.]
PTOLEMY
[Alone, thinks aloud while scribbling.]: Let's see, __ days's sail at
__ stades
a day, gives us __ stades, gives us [he calculates carefully] 11°
difference
longitude, bearing ESE gives us 3°10' difference latitude. Then,
"satyrs"?
Yes, big, hairy, ape sort of things. Tailed people? [consults a scroll,
perhaps
Ctesias's Indica.] Well,
why not?
And
thus it gets set down in the Geography.
Hazardous
guessing, yet modern scholars consider that Ptolemy did describe the
Malay
peninsula, which he called the Golden Chersonese, with fair accuracy.[4]
The "satyr" in "Islands of the Satyrs" I
think can fruitfully be explained. In
classical mythology, the satyrs are the followers of Dionysus, god of
wine and
ecstacy, beings of unrestrained character and bad morals who turn up in
all
kinds of stories. They are described in poetry and painted on pots as
very
hairy halfmen, goat-men or horse-men, with tails. They live in the
woods.
Because
of these features, more scientific-minded Greeks and Romans applied the
name "satyr" to a large type of ape which they knew dimly by report
from Africa or "farther India."[5] The orangutan is the most impressively
man-like
primate of the region beyond India, and it is perfectly natural to
suppose (if
we overlook the fact that orangutans have no tails) that Ptolemy's
"satyrs,"
described at third-hand—or ninth-hand—were orangutans.
It
was the note on the tailed people that really got my attention. The
story
Borneo people tell that somewhere out there in the jungle, over the
next range
of hills, or far, far, up the ulu,
live a race of tailed human beings is perhaps the most persistent
Borneo myth.
Carl Bock heard it told him in East Kalimantan a hundred years ago, and
a
retainer of the Sultan of Kutei made a great effort to find him a pair
of
specimens. (This man's eagerness got him in trouble with the Sultan of
Pasir,
who misunderstood the phrasing of his letter.)[6] I heard the story about tailed people in
Lundu, on
the other side of Borneo, and one can probably still hear it in Brunei,
Banjarmasin, and Bario. Who knows how many eager explorers have scoured
the
jungles of Darkest Borneo for a peek at the Caudate Tribe? Bock himself
pursued
the rumors for a while because he thought they might lead him to the
Darwinian "missing link."
By
way of explanation, the tails that these people are supposed to have
are
neither long nor monkey-like. The East-Kalimantese told Bock that the
tailed
people were called orang boentoet
and that their "tail" was a stiff, three or four inch long prolongation
of the
coccyx. The word in Lundu is orang panjai tungkin, which means exactly this.[7] Everybody agrees that the Tailed People have
to sit
on stools with holes bored in the seat, or, if they sit on the ground,
dig a
small hole to accomodate their appendage.
But
neither Malay, Dayak, nor orang puteh
can show you a tailed man, woman, or child. They're always somewhere
else, over
the next mountain.
Spencer
St. John also heard plenty about the "tailed people" rumors, and
conjectured
that the story came into being when someone in the jungle failed to
notice that
the tail of the Dayak man's chawat
was part of the cloth rather than of the person.[8]
In
conclusion, although the interpretation of Ptolemy's coordinates is at
best
doubtful, and orangutans did live in his time in Java and Sumatra as
well as
Borneo, although stories of tailed people do turn up elsewhere in
Southeast
Asia, and despite the numerous other problems with the evidence, I
think that
on the whole, people who feel like it have a good warrant to see
something of
Borneo in Ptolemy's description of the Islands of the Satyrs. I propose
that
the man who was the original traveler and source of
Ptolemy's information visited the area around the mouth of
the Kapuas. This might explain the trio of "islands."
But the best part of this
investigation is the fun of knowing that even 2000 years ago Borneo
folks were
hoaxing themselves and others with the old
Tailed-People-Live-Just-Over-The-Next-Ridge story. A good joke lives on!
REFERENCES
Aelian
On the
characteristics of animals.
trans.
A.F. Scholfield. Loeb Classical
Library (LCL), 1959.
Bock, Carl Alfred
1881 The
headhunters of Borneo.
London,
Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington.
Pliny the Elder
Natural history. trans. by H. Rackham, LCL, 1956.
Pausanias
Description of
Greece. trans. W.H.S. Jones,
LCL,
1959
Ptolemy
La geographie de
PtolemŽe, l'Inde (VII, 1-4).
texte
Žtabli par Louis Renou. Paris, Librairie Ancienne Edouard Champion,
1925.
St. John, Spenser
1862 Life in the
forests of the far east.
reprint 1986
Oxford University Press, Singapore.
Wheatley, Paul
1980 The
Golden Khersonese. Kuala
Lumpur, Penerbit Universiti Malaya.
Warmington, Eric
Herbert
1970 sec. 4 -6 of article "Ptolemy" in Oxford
classical dictionary, 2nd.
ed, ed.
N.G.L. Hammond and H.H. Scullard, Oxford, Clarendon Press.
[1]My translation from the Greek text as edited by Renou, book 7, chap. 2, sec. 30 (p. 60).
[2]Ptolemy gives the coordinates 160° (east of the Canaries), 3°S for "Sabara," at the tip of the Golden Chersonese and 171°, 6° 10' S (the latitude varies in different manuscripts) for the Islands of the Satyrs. See Wheatley, pp. 138-144 for a discussion of Ptolemy's methods and errors.
[3]See Wheatley and Warmington.
[4]So Warmington in the OCD.
[5]Pliny the
Elder first mentions "satyrs" living in the deserts of
northwest Africa [5.44].
Diodorus Siculus [1.18.4] places them in "Ethiopia"
as followers of Osiris, and
Pausanias relates a weird sailor story about
"satyrs" on desert islands somewhere
in the Mediterranean sea
[1.23.5-6].
Pliny the Elder also
gives the name "satyr" to an "Indian" animal
[7.24]. Here satyrs seem
to be a plausible kind of ape,
although Pliny surrounds them with Dog-headed People,
Troglodytes, and Monopeds. When
Pliny
describes a habit of the Indian "satyrs" in
10.99, his translator plumps outright for the
translation
"ourang-outang."
Aelian also refers to
some kind of "Indian" ape by the word "satyr"
[16.21].
For an idea of the Greeks thought what the mythical satyr looked like, see Plato Symposium 216c, where Alcibiades compares pot-bellied, snub-nosed Socrates to a satyr. Someone with an active imagination can probably see how Socrates resembled an orangutan.
[6]See Bock, pp. 143-4 and 236-7.
[7]I am indebted to my wife, Nusi Baki, for this information.
[8]St. John, v. I, p. 399.