Maybrat

The Maybrat, who called themselves Ra ro Meibrat, were a people of the central Bird's Head Peninsula, settled around the Ayamaru Lakes. Their Maybrat language, also called Ayamaru after its principal dialect, is usually treated as an isolate and takes its name from mai, meaning language, and the Brat hill of the Ayamaru country.

The Maybrat lived by hunting, fishing and swidden farming, traditionally in scattered homesteads. Their clans were led by men called bobot, whose standing rested on wealth in Timor cloth, the trade textiles which reached New Guinea through Malukan and Malay networks.

From the sixteenth century the peninsula's coasts passed under the loose overlordship of the Sultanate of Tidore, after the Portuguese Jorge de Menezes first sighted them in 1526. The Maybrat lake country kept its dispersed clan order beyond coastal rajas and their ports.