of lakan. In communities which historically had strong political or trade connections with Indianized polities in Indonesia and Malaysia, the paramount ruler was called a rajah. Among the Subanon people of the Zamboanga Peninsula, the most senior thimuay is referred to as the "thimuay labi", or as sulotan in more Islamized Subanon communities. In some other portions of the Visayas and Mindanao, there was no separate name for the most senior ruler, so the paramount ruler was simply called a datu, although one datu was identifiable as the most senior.Confer also: Non-sovereign monarchy. Nobility The noble or aristocratic nature of datus and their relatives is asserted in folk origin myths, was widely acknowledged by foreigners who visited the Philippine archipelago, and is upheld by modern scholarship. Succession to the position of datu was often (although not always) hereditary, and datus derived their mandate to lead from their membership in an aristocratic class. Records of Chinese traders and Spanish colonizers describe datus or paramount datus as sovereign princes and principals. Travellers who came to the Philippine archipelago from kingdoms or empires such as Song and Ming dynasty China, or 16th Century Spain, even initially referred to datus or paramount datus as "kings", even though they later discovered that datus did not exercise absolute sovereignty over the members of their barangays. Indigenous conceptions of nobility and aristocracy Both now and in early Philippine history, Filipino worldview had a conception of the self or individual being deeply and holistically connected to a larger community, expressed in the language of Filipino psychology as "kapwa." This indigenous conception of self strongly defined the roles and obligations played by individuals within their society. This differentiation of roles and obligations is also more broadly characteristic of Malayo-Polynesian and Austronesian cultures where, as Mulder explains: This "essential inequality of individuals and their mutual obligations to each other" informed the reciprocal relationships (expressed in the Filipino value of "utang na loob") that defined the three-tiered social structure typical among early Philippine peoples. These settlements were characterized by a three-tier social structure, which, while slightly different between different cultures and polities, generally included a slave class (alipin/oripun), a class of commoners (timawa), and at the apex, an aristocratic or "noble" class. The noble class was exclusive, and its members were not allowed to marry outside of the aristocracy. Only members of this cognatically defined social class could rise to the