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APPENDIX D.
what is known as the Sangam Age more than 25,000 lines of verse have been written by poets who' flourished between the years 50 A.D. and ,150 A.D. It is further assumed that many thousands more are lost owing, perhaps, to the ravages of insects. The first, question that a scientific student of History will propose is when were they written and what was the script employed. For one thing it is certain that the poets of the Madura
Academy could not have employed the modern • Tamil character, which, as is well kftown, is the Grantha-Tamil introrluced into the Pandyan Country by the Cholas at a period when their power was rapidly reviving after the fall of the Pallavas, i.e., 9th and 10th centuries A.D. When later on the Cholas effected the conquest of the Pandya territory, the GranihaTamil which was essentially the Chola script was not only widely used but it gradually began to supplant the Pandyan character known to Palæographists as Vatteluttu. Writing nany years hefore the discovery of the caverns and the Brāhmi inscriptions of South India, Burnell thought that the Vatteluttu and the South Asokan character were totally distinct importations and postulated a Semitic original in both the cases. The late Mr. T. A. Gopinath Rao in criticising the views of both Burnell and Bühler, has not only pointed out several points of similarity between Vatteluttu on the one hand and the other alphabets of South
