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- A RESUME.
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authority in Sangam literature for arriving at such a conclusion. The verses relied upon by him merely mention that the Mauryas came southwards. There is nothing to indicate that they stayed in the land in occupation of forts for any very length of time. Again all references in the Sangam poems to the defeat of Vada Ariyar or Northern Ariyar by Neduncheliyan, among others, indicate, perhaps, the attemptoof the Tamil chiefs to prevent the Gupta forces from entering the Tamil country. The fact that Samudragupta did not care to penetrate into the Tamil land is a point in illustration. From the preceding discussion it is clear that the date of the Sangam cannot be the second century A.D.
An attempt has been made to show that the A Resume. great Mauryan invasion of the south took place in the time of Senguttuvan. The Mauryas referred to were not the forces of Chandragupta Maurya who could not have been a contempo-, rary of Senguttuvan. We are, therefore forced to conclude that the invasion referred to by Māmūlanār was the one undertaken by Samudragupta, and that the date of the last Sangam is to be sought for at sthe end of the fourth or the beginning of the fifth century A.D.
We shall now proceed to consider another Another kind of criticism regarding the later origin of the third Sangam. It has been very often remarked that the Sangam should have existed centuries before the rise of the Pallava power on the ground that the Sangam literature did
criticsin.
