Aru kingdom
one of Karo monarchies
Aru (كراجأن ارو; or Haru) was a major Malay Sumatran kingdom from the 13th to the 16th century. It was located on the eastern coast of North Sumatra, Indonesia. In its heyday the kingdom was a formidable maritime power, and was able to control the northern part of the Malacca strait.
The kingdom was initially established as a Melayu polity. The indigenous population practiced native animism as well as Hinduism. During the 13th century, Islam came to be practiced alongside the existing faiths. Aru's capital was located close to present-day Medan and Deli Serdang. The people of the kingdom are believed to have been descendants of the Malay from the interior of North Sumatra.
Location
Traditionally, the location of Haru or Aru is connected to the site of its successor state, the Sultanate of Deli, which was in and around the city of Medan and Deli Serdang today, as suggested by British orientalist Winstedt. However, Groenveldt, a Dutch historian, has suggested that the center of the Haru Kingdom was located further southeast, near the estuary of the Barumun and Panai Rivers, in Labuhan Batu Regency, and is thus related and connected to the earlier Pannai Kingdom.
“Aru kingdom” enters the record as one of Karo monarchies. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what kingdom, Karo and monarchies can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Aru kingdom” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.