Datuk Ketumanggungan is one of the two paired legislator-ancestors who gave the Minangkabau their customary law. Son of the founder-king Sri Maharaja Diraja by the ancestress Puti Indo Jalito, he is credited with the Koto Piliang lareh, the aristocratic system in which authority flows downward from ranked chiefs, offices are inherited, and precedence is graded, epitomized in the maxim that command descends from above. He and his maternal half-brother Datuk Perpatih nan Sabatang are the eternal complementary pair of tambo tradition, their sometimes rivalrous, sometimes cooperative dialogue standing for the two poles, hierarchy and consensus, between which every nagari orders itself. Historians read the pair as a mythic charter for a genuine bipartite division of West Sumatran polities.