Dompu

The Dompu, or Dou Dompu, are an Austronesian people of central Sumbawa, between the Bimanese east and the Sumbawanese west. Their land was one of the six old chiefdoms, or kedatuan, of Sumbawa listed alongside Bima and Tambora; local tradition also connects it with the age of the Majapahit minister Gajah Mada.

Anciently Buddhist in culture, Dompu was fully Islamized in the course of the seventeenth century, like its neighbours, and its rulers later bore the title of sultan.

The catastrophe of Dompu history was the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815: only twelve villages survived, and the shattered districts were resettled by migrants from Bima. The descendants of the old Dompu thus became effectively a subgroup of the Bimanese, their speech surviving as the Dompu dialect of the Bima language with traces of the Tambora culture the eruption destroyed.