history: This art dates from before the 9th Century. Wayang came before Indian influence, the present-day heroes having evolved from ancestral spirits. In ancient pre-Hindu times, wayang puppets were perhaps portraits of deceased ancestors who came down to earth to visit and communicate with their descendants during the performance. Its function was to exorcize, placate, and please the gods so as to increase fertility. The moving flickering silhouettes were considered the very souls of the dead and the puppeteer (dalang) probably was first a shamanistic priest, the medium between the dead and living. During the time of intense Hindu influence (8th to 15th Centuries), Hindu teachers used the wayang medium to propagandise and popularize their religion. Indian epic heroes, gods, demons and giants supplanted all the ancestor figures (except the clowns). Records tell of a remote King Airlangga enjoying puppet performances at his court in Java in the 11th Century. These shows had a strong influence on Java-Hindu sculpture. On 13th Century basreliefs you can see figures similar to those of the wayang puppets of the time, portraying all the same persons and events as the characters do today. When Hinduism started to give way to Islam in the 13th Century, Indonesian Muslims simply made heroes of Islamic literary figures and turned them into puppets. Shadow plays were used by sultans to flatter themselves and their courts, to glorify and perpetuate the feudalistic court ritual of the Javanese royalty. Wayang, by reinforcing the class system, has always kept everyone exactly in their place. Since Muslims banned the reproduction of the human form both good and evil puppets were made ugly and grotesque so that they wouldn't resemble living beings, and the puppets' faces, coloring, hairdoes, clothes and jewelry are to this day so strongly stylized that they are more symbols than actual human figures. Wayang figures are the only figural representations left over from the graphic arts of the early Islamic period. The Javanese colonialists have gradually transmitted wayang and its ethical system all over the archipelago.