La sériciculture à Sumatra Nord. De l'histoire à la légende de Job

摘要

Claudine Salmon, Centre national de la Recherche scientifique, Paris La sériciculture à Sumatra Nord. De l'histoire à la légende de Job The history of sericulture in Indonesia is poorly documented. Some hints are to be found in Chinese and European records, but to the best of our knowledge local sources are almost silent. The first allusion to silkworm raising appears in the Zhufan zhi "A Description of Barbarous People" (1225) for Java. If this activity was not very successful in Java, it developed rather well in North Sumatra where it was well rooted and, with ups and downs, lasted over five centuries. It has just came to an end in the late 1980s. This paper is divided into three parts. The first attempts to reconstruct the history of this activity as it may be perceived in various travelogues. The second relates the fascinating legend of the origin of the silkworm, which was collected in Aceh at the beginning of the 20th century by a Dutch official. This legend, which links the worms that inhabited the sores of Ayyûb (the Job of the Bible) to the first silkworms, takes us far from China to the Middle- East and further westwards into Southern Europe. Finally, the paper reflects on the significance of this industry in the political and commercial context of North Sumatra in which Arabs, Persians and other Muslim merchants who came from India all took a part.