Luwu

The Kingdom of Luwu (also Luwuq or Wareq) was a polity located in northern part of South Sulawesi. province of Indonesia, on Sulawesi island. It is considered one of the earliest known Bugis kingdom in Sulawesi, founded between 10th and 14th century. However, recent archaeological research has challenged the idea. In 1889, Dutch administrator of Makassar Braam Morris placed Luwu's heyday between the 10th and 14th centuries, but offered no clear evidence. The La Galigo, an epic poem composed in a literary form of the Bugis language, is the likely inspiration of the dating. Morris' theory combined two older concepts which were already common in the region, which are (1) the so-called 'primordial age' as described within La Galigo, and (2) the widespread belief of other Bugis polities in South Sulawesi, who viewed the rulers of Luwu as the most senior lineages of all Bugis rulers. However, historians and archaeologists expressed doubts regarding these claims. They noted that any historical records and chronologies of Luwu were 'disappointingly shallow' and 'absent of any evidence'. Meanwhile, the Bugis world described in La Galigo depicted a vaguely defined world of coastal and riverine kingdoms whose economies are based on trade. Two early centers of this world were Luwu and the kingdom of Cina (pronounced Cheena) in what is now Wajo. The incompatibility of the La Galigo's trade-based political economy with the agricultural economies of other South Sulawesi kingdoms has led scholars to posit an intervening period of chaos to separate the two societies chronologically. Archaeological and textual research carried out since the 1980s has undermined this chronology, however. Extensive surveys and excavations in Luwu have revealed that the Bugis-speaking kingdom is a century or so younger than the oldest polities of the southwest peninsula. The earliest textual reference to Luwu is in the Majapahit court poem Desawarnana (c.1365), which listed Luwu, Bantaeng in southern part of the island, and Uda (possibly Cina) as the three major powers on the peninsula.