Saudeleur dynasty

The Saudeleur dynasty was the first organised government to unite the island of Pohnpei in the eastern Caroline Islands of Micronesia, ruling from roughly 1100 CE until about 1628 CE.

Its rulers, each titled the Saudeleur, presided over what is regarded as the earliest known centralised political system in the western Pacific, governing an estimated population of around 25,000 from the artificial-islet city of Nan Madol off Temwen Island. According to Pohnpeian oral tradition the dynasty was founded by Olosohpa, one of two sorcerer-brothers (with Olisihpa) said to have arrived from a mythical western land called Katau; the line is remembered as comprising roughly eight to seventeen rulers of the Dipwilap ("Great") clan over about a dozen generations. The Saudeleur exercised absolute, increasingly tributary rule, drawing fish, breadfruit, yams, and labour from the island's chiefly districts (wei) to sustain the elite at Nan Madol, where most of the megalithic basalt-and-coral architecture was raised between about 1180 and 1300. Oral histories portray later Saudeleur as progressively oppressive, prompting the legendary warrior Isokelekel, said to have come from Kosrae, to invade and overthrow the dynasty around 1628. His victory inaugurated the decentralised Nahnmwarki chiefly system that structures Pohnpeian society to the present, and Nan Madol, the dynasty's monumental capital, is today a UNESCO World Heritage Site.