Abstract
Abstract Abui is a Papuan language spoken in Alor Island, South-East Indonesia. Although there are rich studies on the Abui language and its structure, research on Abui toponymy, which aids the understanding of language, culture, and society, deserves greater attention. This paper analyzes features of Abui society through Abui toponyms collected using Field Linguistics and Language Documentation methods. It finds that, because place names communicate valuable information on peoples and territories, Abui toponyms reflect the agrarian lifestyle of Abui speakers and, more broadly, the close relationship that the people have with their landscape. Furthermore, Abui toponyms express positive traits in the Abui culture like kinship ties and bravery. Notwithstanding, like other pre-literate and indigenous societies, oral stories are commonly used to explain how places are named. This paper augments the existing Abui toponymic studies on the connection between names and the places they name and provides a deeper understanding of the Abui language, culture, and society.
Highlights
In terms of social organisation and subsistence lifeways the Medjay people mentioned in Egyptian documents were originally and quintessentially desert
The Medjay were a group of desert nomads inhabiting the region between the Nile and the Red Sea contemporaneous to the Bronze Age of Ancient Egypt (c. 3100-1050 bce)
Urbanization, monumental architecture, or literacy, while comparatively common features of ancient states are not at all universal pre-conditions for complex polities. With this approach in mind, this analysis, without driving for a definitional goal of ‘state’, ‘polity’, or even ‘nomadic organisation’ for the ancient Medjay of the Eastern Desert, aims to illustrate what we can say about local political organisation in the deserts east of the Egyptian and Sudanese Niles
Summary
700-200 bce) do mention encounters with Eastern Desert groups, but little information can be gleaned from these records These encounters, mentioning cattle as well as women and children, were not so much battles but better explained as nomadic seasonal movements into the valley. The modern Beja word had’a ‘lord, sheikh’, later transcribed in Coptic script as khara.[50] This makes it likely that the name Kheru was a title or sobriquet for a tribal chief and might suggest even at this point in history there was an established ‘elite class’ After this period, the use of the untranslatable Meroitic language in local inscriptions The use of the untranslatable Meroitic language in local inscriptions (c. 200 bce-400 ce) means that we are uncertain of the relationship between Nubia and the nomads
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