Batak

Batak is the collective name for related Austronesian peoples of the North Sumatran highlands, settled around Lake Toba and its river valleys. Though long seen as isolated inlanders, they joined maritime trade for over a thousand years, carrying camphor, benzoin and pepper on their backs to ports such as Barus, where a Tamil inscription of 1088 records a foreign merchant community.

In 1337 they were still organized by exogamous marga clans under a syncretic religion of ancestor worship, Hindu and Buddhist ideas; priest-healers kept handwritten bark books called pustaha in the Surat Batak script.

From the sixteenth century rice sales to the pepper-growing Aceh Sultanate drew them deeper into coastal commerce, while the southern Mandailing and Angkola accepted Islam under Minangkabau influence during the Padri War of 1821 to 1837; the Toba and Karo highlands kept their old customs longer.