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Lot 659
A tobacco pipe "tulpang" or "genduk"
Estimated Value:
1.500 € - 2.500 €
Result:
incl. Premium and VAT
Description:
Toba-Batak, Indonesia, North Sumatra, 19th cent.L. 85 cm
Brass. Particularly large, heavy smoking pipe made of brass. Pipes of this type were important prestige items among the Toba and Simalungun Batak in North Sumatra and were sometimes passed down through many generations. Among other things, the pipes were important as gifts between nobles at clan alliances and weddings. The pipe consists of two parts and is carried over the shoulder on a heavy brass chain like a carrier bag. To smoke, the bowl is placed on the ground or on a special wooden bench. The pipe is elbow-shaped and has a large funnel-shaped bowl for filling with tobacco and possibly intoxicants (not opium, for which special pipes were used). It is cast in a lost mold; partially smoothed and filed. The surface is applied with figurative and geometric motifs, among which the spherical rows and double spiral motifs characteristic of the Batak as well as raised ancestor and singa motifs stand out. The latter stand for the legitimization of the Batak high nobility and for the three-part world order, whereby the singa, a mythical primordial being, embodies the underworld and the mostly crouching ancestor figures the upper world or sphere of the gods, according to the three-layered world model of the Batak, which is also the basis of cosmology in a similar way in many other parts of the world. The spherical motifs probably go back to the Hindu ruler symbolism of the lotus throne.
From an old German private collection, collected since the 1950s - Very minor wear
Lit.: IFICAH (2018): The kinship in the neck. Ancestor worship and blade art of the Batak in North Sumatra. International Foundation of Indonesian Culture and Asian Heritage. Hollenstedt. S. 118-119
Tobacco was originally imported to the Visayas and Luzon by the Spanish and Portuguese and cultivated there as a cash crop; it has been known in Southeast Asia since the late 16th century. As an expensive commodity, it embodied prestige, wealth, social status and - not least - functioning foreign relations and cosmopolitanism in the early days of its spread.
The Batak are one of the largest and most influential ethnic groups in Indonesia. First mentioned in Europe by Marco Polo with reference to older Arabic sources as Batta or Ba-Ta (“pork-eaters”), the Batak ethnic group today comprises around 6 million people. The Batak are divided into six ethnic groups whose original settlement area is on Samosir, the island in Lake Toba. The largest group are the Toba, who settle around the southern half of Lake Toba and on Samosir. A total of around 4.8 million of the 6 million Batak live in the Toba highlands.
Various theories are known about the origin of the Batak. One theory is that the Batak came from the mountainous regions of Thailand and Burma in several waves of immigration, from where they first reached the west coast of Sumatra. However, linguistic evidence suggests that the first Austronesian-speaking ethnic groups arrived in Sumatra around 2,500 years ago.
