Studies in Moral History, Law, and Religion By Najib M. Salebi Chapter 1 History of Magin Dineo Magin Dineo History and Genealogies Introduction The history of Mindanao prior to the advent of Islam is traditional and mythological, and no effort has been made to put it on record. With Islam came knowledge, art, and civilization. A new system of government was instituted and its records were registered. Tarsala I were written and the noble lineage of the Datus was carefully kept. Each sultanate or datorship kept a separate genealogy. These genealogies, called Tarsala or Salsala, were very limited in their scope and brief in their narration of events. They are our only source of written information on the early history of the Moros, and are valuable on that account. Previously the Moros withheld these Tarsala and kept them away from all foreigners and non-Mohammadans, but their attitude has changed lately, and several different Salsala were secured from the chief Datus of the Rio Grande valley. 1. The original manuscripts could not be bought, but exact and true copies of the same have been secured and translated and their translations are herein published for the first time. The Transliteration These Tarsala are written in the Magin Deneo dialect with Arabic characters, and a great part of their text is Magin Deneo names which have never yet been expressed by means of Romantic characters. In translating these Tarsala such a large number of words have to be transliterated that it is deemed necessary to adopt a system of transliteration which can be easily understood by every English reader and which is more adequate to express Magin Deneo sounds than either Spanish or English. Such a system is herein adopted and is briefly described as follows. With the exception of Inge and Sh, the characters used in this system are simple and represent simple sounds only. Every radical modification of a certain simple sound is regarded as a different simple sound and is represented by a separate and distinct character. Every compound sound is represented by those characters that express its simple constituent sounds. It is an unvarying rule in this system that every character represents an invariable sound and every sound has only one invariable character. The Magin Deneo dialect has only 27 simple sounds and can be expressed by 27 simple characters. These characters are the following. A-I-U-U-U-B-D-G-I-N-G-H-J-K-L-M-N-N-P-Q-R-S-S-H-T-W-Y-Z. The sounds which these characters represent conform very closely to the original Roman sounds of the letters. A is the short sound of A. It is pronounced midway between the A in bad and the E in bed. A is pronounced as the A in far, father. I is pronounced as the I in fin, ill. I is pronounced as the I in machine, police. U is pronounced as the U in put, push. U is pronounced as the U in rude, flute. U is a mid vowel, pronounced with the tongue slightly moved from its normal position. It is intermediate between U