various festivities, dances, arts and temples. Rituals of the life cycle are also important occasions for religious expression and artistic display. Ceremonies at puberty, marriage, and, most notably, cremation at death provide opportunities for Balinese to communicate their ideas about community, status, and the afterlife. Balinese Hindu society Scholars dispute the degree and nature of social stratification in medieval and contemporary Balinese Hindu society. The social structure consisted of catur wangsa (four varnas) - brahmana (priests), satriya or "Deva" (warriors), waisya (merchants), and sudra (farmers, artisans, commoners). There is no historical or contemporary cultural record of untouchables in Balinese Hindu society. The wangsa - termed castes by some accounts, classes by other accounts - were functional, not hierarchical nor segregated in Hindu society of Bali or Java. Further, there was social mobility - people could change their occupation and caste if they wished to. Among the interior highlands of Bali, the desa (villages) have had no wangsa, the social status and profession of a person has been mutable, and marriages not endogamous. Historical inscriptions suggest Balinese Hindu kings and village chiefs have come from all sections of its society - priests, warriors, merchants and artisans. Hinduism in Java Both Java and Sumatra were subject to considerable cultural influence from the Indian subcontinent. The earliest evidences of Hindu influences in Java can be found in 4th century Tarumanagara inscriptions scattered around modern Jakarta and Bogor. In the sixth and seventh centuries many maritime kingdoms arose in Sumatra and Java which controlled the waters in the Straits of Malacca and flourished with the increasing sea trade between China and India and beyond. During this time, scholars from India and China visited these kingdoms to translate literary and religious texts.From the 4th to the 15th century, Java had many Hindu kingdoms, such as Tarumanagara, Kalingga, Mataram, Kediri, Sunda, Singhasari and Majapahit. This era is popularly known as the Javanese Classical Era, during which Hindu-Buddhist literature, art and architecture flourished and were incorporated into local culture under royal patronage. During this time, many Hindu temples were built, including 9th century Prambanan near Yogyakarta, which has been designated a World Heritage Site. Among these Hindu kingdoms, Majapahit kingdom was the largest and the last significant Hindu kingdom in Indonesian history. Majapahit was based in East Java, from where it ruled a large part of what is now Indonesia. The remnants of the Majapahit kingdom shifted