Murut

The Murut are a cluster of Austronesian peoples native to the interior hills and river valleys of northern Borneo, from southwestern Sabah and Sarawak's Lawas district to Brunei's Temburong and North Kalimantan's Nunukan regency. The name is not their own: it was given by Malay and Bajau traders under Brunei and means roughly “hill people”; colonial writers classed them as Dayak.

They speak the Murutic languages, a family of closely related Austronesian tongues, and are divided into many sub-groups such as the Tagol and Timugon. Shifting rice cultivators living in longhouses, they kept animist beliefs and a headhunting culture whose fighters fought with blowpipes and woven bark armour.

From the 1300s, as Brunei expanded along the coasts, they traded forest and river produce through coastal middlemen and supplied warriors to the sultan, remaining largely beyond direct rule in their remote valleys.