IN ANCIENT MAORI LAND.

Hot Lakes Chronicle, Volume 3, Issue 149, 9 October 1895, Page 3

IN ANCIENT MAORI LAND.

Notes collected from ttif. descendants of the ABORIGINAL I-EOrLE OF THE RANGITA nrrYATXEYANDtheUbewexa. CoromtY, axis from the Mataatua Tribes. By ELSDON BEST.

Given by members of the Nprati-Manu-w.-i. Ngiiti-Whare, Tuhoc, Ngati-Apa, Ngnti-Awa, Ngati-Harnua and Patuiueuheu Tribes.

"KoiiiKornA nga makamaka o JMataATTA."*

CHAPTER I. "How the Maori preserved his knowledge of the fast. To those who have studied the effect of the adoption of a written lnnuuago by a race on its march towards civilisation —nothing is more noticeable than the singular results of such an adoption in connection with tho retentive powers of the memory. A race living in a state of letterless bar"barism, not yet relying on a written character to preserve tho memory of past events and achievements, retains and transmits orally tho most lengthy traditions, poems, and genealogies villi singular facility and precision. Preserved in such a manner were tho poems of Homer, tho Indian Vcdas, the Kalevala of the Finnish race, that great epic poem of 22,000 verses. The Maori of New Zealand, not having evolved or borrowed a graphic system, was nevertheless most careful and successful in conserving tho ancient lore of his race, their songs, proverbs, folk-lore, legends mythology and genealogies—having possibly derived this pride in their ancient knowledge and history from somo offshoot •of that wonderful race who, for o many centuries preserved tho sacred Yedas by means of oral teaching. Through all the dim traditions of a remote past retained by the Maori in his wanderings across tho ' Great Ocean of Kiwa,' in his singular rites and ceremonies, in his wonderful system of mythology, in his high class ancient chants, there can be noted the traces of a superior culture to that which has obtained among the various divisions of the far-spreading Polynesian race within historic times. It. is an ethnological axiom that when a race becomes scattered and isolated in small communities, that race must necessarily become less cohesive in arts and general knowledge, or, in a wonl, deteriorates in culture. From whatever far-off land (lie ancient Maori came, whatever old-timedynas-ty claimed him subject, whethei were ho allied to the Turanian or Aryan, Acadian or Dravidian races, whether his far away ancestors marched westward with the great Indo-Germanic migration or eastward a thousand years later into India, withstood Mongolian hortbs on northern steppes, or cultivated the Valley of the Wonderful City—whatever source he may have sprung from—tho fact shines clear to those who may look upon it, that the Maori, Mahori or fair Polynesian of io-day, retains in his mythology, karakia and traditions, plain evidence of having originally known a higher state of general culture, a culture that has gradually fallen from him during many centuries of wandering over the vast Pacific, of isolation in small groups, of privations in grainless lands, of sojournings in enervating climates, of countless wars and forced migrations. 1 lid the Maori ever have any Knowledge of written characters? This is an extremely interesting question and one on which different opinions are held. Tylor, one of our leading English anthropologists, has held, with nuinylothers. that no race that has acquired n graphic system, whether pictographic, symbolic, or phonetic, ever loses the knowledge of that art, and the researches of paleographists go far to prove the fact. The western origin of the Maori is now well established, and also that he travelled ever eastward in his wanderings, from the original Uawaiki of bygone ages to those islts which are stamped upon his memory asWAEnoTI, Waehota; I'akista, Paea, Wiutj, TpXGA, Tawhiti-nui, Tawiuti-uoa, Tawiuti-3'amajiao and Tk Honoiwaikfa. \\ hat graphic systems are known in the west and for what period have tl-ey 1m in in use among the nationspossensing them? TheTagalo, Bisayaand Ilocano tribes of the Philippine group have loug possessed a semi-syllahic alphabet, ailied to the Javanese and Severn! of the Indian types, and of wliich tin. prototype- is"the alphahct of the inscriptions of A.solta, giandson ol Cliaiidragupia founder oi' the gieat Minna dynasty, which inscriptions wore incised upon rocks in five different parts of India a'out the year 200 n.c. Tin.- date of the adoption by the Philippine tribes of this system is unfortunately not known, inasmuch as the fanatic followers of Legaspi destroyed with pious y.enl these most interesting written records of the outpost of the Malayan race. Of all the sporadic alphabetic systerns of the Asiatie Archipelago that of-the Bugis or Wugis of Celebes is the most eastern, and the literature of this people does not date further back than -100 years from tho present time. Eastward of the Moluccas the extension oi' this great sign of a higher culture was stopped by the impene- » tiabk' v.all ol' Papuan barbarism,

Tlio semi-syllabjcalphabetiosystems of Java and Biili and of the Buttak* of Sumatra, which last people occupy (he unique position of being the only cannibal race in the world who make use of a written tongue—are all derived from hd Indian source and have probably been in use, at least in Java, for at least nine centuries. The ancient Kavri of Java was elosely ailied to the Peva-uagari in which character the Sanscrit literature is conserved, and the use of the Kawi and other obsolete systems in Java is lost in the mists of antiquity. These then are the nearest systems of that great art that has done more than any other to free the human mind from the shackles of barbarism and to promote the advancement of civilisation. With the single exemption of the strange symbolic characters of the Easter Island 1 ablets, no sign of a written language is met with in the vast extent of the island system lying between Celebes, in the" East Indies, and America. If the Maori passed through these lettered peoples on his eastward course, ho either forced his way through as a barbarian scorning the advantages of writing, or lie has lost the art during his adventurous migrations from isle to isle on his way to Aotearoa. But tho probability is that ho passed through the East Indies long before the art of writing was known in those isles, with the possible exception of Java.

*Battak—The 'Padda' of Herodotus. The final 'k' is mute in Malay, being replaced by a soft aspirate. [To be continued.]