What on earth is a Sumpah-Sumpah?
Malcolm Peaker (noreply@blogger.com)
In recent articles I described the activities of Alfred St Alban Smith who sent a large number of animals, particularly reptiles, from south-east Asia to London Zoo between 1927 and 1936. The Annual Reports of ZSL listed them all the species by common name. But some of those common names are not ones we may recognise nearly 100 years later. One was Sumpah-Sumpah. I had no idea what a sumpah-sumpah is. Some digging found it on a 2005 Malaysian postage stamp, one of four is a set of ‘rare reptiles