Minjak tanah — Malay “earth-oil”, i.e. natural petroleum — is the white, milk-like medicinal petroleum of Aroe whose springs at Pangkalan Soesoe gave the bay of Aroe its older name Moeware perhentian or Moeware Sija-na-ma-tara in the language of De Conti, and whose fame, in the chronicle tradition, the Atjehnese conquest of Aroe did not extinguish. It is the trade-good whose name, in bedekte taal form, encodes both the Queen of Aroe’s flight (minha cumbaa = minjak sembawa) and the bay’s sacred geography.
The springs at Pangkalan Soesoe
Pangkalan Soesoe — “the name ‘milk’ recalls the milky-white colour of the earth-oil here” — is the place at the head of the bay of Aroe where, in Van Rijn’s day, ten dwellings of Malays who had fled from Besitang stood on the high bank. The name in the language of De Conti (~1430) — Moeware perhentian or Moeware Sija-na-ma-tara — De Roo de la Faille decodes as m-oe-aram-oe-ara sija-mata-ra, “the perhentian [stopping-place] of the goddess Tara”, the patroness of Sumatra. The white earth-oil of the springs was, in pre-Atjehnese times, the principal medicinal export of the east-coast Hindu-Buddhist commonwealth.
The Queen of Aroe’s flight
In Pinto’s account of the Atjeh-Aroe War (1539), the queen — having made her unsuccessful counter-stroke against the Atjehnese plunderers — fled to “a place called minha cumbaa”, from which she sailed to Malacca. De Roo de la Faille decodes minha cumbaa as minjak sembawa, i.e. the minjak tanah of Aroe — the white petroleum of Pangkalan Soesoe: the queen’s flight, in this reading, was to the very springs whose fame had made the bay’s name in the older geography.
The Atjehsche kroniekje’s joke
A Maleisch kroniekje van Atjeh — a small Malay chronicle of Atjeh — jests, De Roo de la Faille records, of the minjak tanah of Aroe together with the minjak kapoer (camphor-oil) of Baros, that both were used by the radja of Roem as a medicine. Roem De Roo de la Faille decodes as Aroe-T-aroem-a, the “perfumed Aroe”. The same jest, recorded in the chronicle, marks the survival of the medicinal reputation of the Aroe petroleum into the Atjehnese age — even though, by the seventeenth century, “that reputation had already much weakened”.
The Compagnie’s experiment
In the colonial period the Compagnie experimented with exporting the minjak tanah of Aroe, in pots, “but this did not catch on”. In Surabaya the oil of Djaba-Kota was still used as lamp-oil, and in Rembang the minjak tanah was formerly used as a medicine — the place-name Tinawoen, De Roo de la Faille notes, being a contraction of As-tina-noew-oen, “thanksgiving for that gift”, which recalled the minjak tanah of the Overwal’s Astina, the ancestral land also of Rembang.
Significance
For AcehWiki, minjak tanah is the principal medicinal trade-good of the east-coast Hindu-Buddhist commonwealth whose absorption by the Atjehnese conquest of Aroe is recorded in the Queen of Aroe’s flight and in the jesting Malay chronicle of Atjeh. Its survival as a name in Pangkalan Soesoe and in the language of De Conti fixes the older sacred geography of the bay against which the Atjehnese age is measured.
See Also
- Pangkalan Soesoe
- Aroe
- Aroe-baai
- Queen of Aroe
- Atjeh-Aroe War (1539)
- Nicolo de Conti
- Kapoer baroer
- Bedekte taal
- Cyama-Tara
- Historische Curiositeiten uit Malajoe en Java
Source
Historische Curiositeiten uit Malajoe en Java, by P. de Roo de la Faille (Den Haag: Maart 1954), chapter “Mendez Pinto op Sumatra”, p. 10, and chapter “Over Sjahroe’n Noewi”, pp. 27-28.