Iskandar Zulkarnain, the two-horned world-conqueror of Qur'anic and Malay legend, stands at the head of the Minangkabau tambo as the apical ancestor of kings. The chronicles hold that his three sons parted to rule the earth: Maharaja Alif taking the lands of the west, Maharaja Dipang the east, and the youngest, Maharaja Diraja, sailing to the archipelago and to Sumatra. Through this descent the Minangkabau bound their ruling house to the prestige of a genealogy shared across the Malay world, a device common to Sumatran and Peninsular court literature that anchored local sovereignty in a universal imperial past.