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· S. K. AYYANGAR'S CONCLUSIONS. 123 the Kaviri. The construction of the Kaviri banks which extended along its course to a distance of about 100 miles from its mouth, was an undertaking of such magnitude that it could not have been completed during the reign of Karikal. The Chõla king, who invaded Ceylon in order to procure captives to work at the banks, might have been, therefore, Karikal or his immediate successor. This tradition is further evidence of the fact that Chengudduva Chera was contemporary with Gajabāhu I who lived in the early part of the second century A.D. Chengudduvan's grandfather Karikal Chõla should have, therefore, peigned in the latter half of the first century A.D. or, in other words, about eighteen hundred ycars ago. It will appear further on, from my account of Tamil literature, that the poets of the last Sangha at Madura, many of whom allude to the Chēra kings, Athan and Chengudduvan-should be assigned to the same period.” The third great effort to fix South Indian S. K. Ayyan.
. gar in Ancient chronology was by Professor S. Krishnaswami India. Ayyəngar. Writing many years before the publication of his Beginnings of South Indian History, he had arrived at the following conclusions :
1. That there was an age of great literary activity in Tamil to warrant the existence of a body like the traditional Sangam.
2: That the period of the greatest Sangam · activity was the age when Senguttuvan Chera
