Banunaek is the ancestral sovereign house of Amanatun, another of the great Meto princedoms of southern West Timor. Its authority rests on the same cosmological pattern that orders every Atoni realm: an origin charter tracing the ruling line to an apical ancestor, custody of the sacred heirlooms in which the le'u of the land is lodged, and the standing of the ruler as the earthly reflection of Uis Neno. The name, carrying the word for 'great', belongs both to the remembered founding ancestors of legend and to the recorded rulers of Amanatun, and in oral tradition the fortunes of the realm's fields and people are held to answer to the good standing of the Banunaek line with sky and earth alike.