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EPIGRAPHIA INDICA.
[VOL. XXI.
it as a brahmadēya on the Northern bank (evidently of the Coleroon). Most probably, it was an agrahāra founded by Parāntaka I Viranärāyana (A.D. 907-53), whose inscriptions are also found in the Anantīśvara temple.
The inscription consists of eight lines of almost equal length, and occupies a space of about 12' by 1}'. Except for the loss of some letters at the end of the first and second lines, it is in a fair state of preservation. The size of the letters is on an average well over an inch, some of the ligatures being 2"high. The characters employed are Tamil and Grantha. The writing is of the regular type found in the Chola inscriptions of the tenth century. The chiselling of the letters is very good and hardly excelled in its beauty by any stone inscription of the period outside the Tanjore temple. In general appearance, our inscription strikingly resembles the Tamil part of the Madras Museum plates of Uttama Chola, allowance being made for the difference in the material on which the inscriptions are engraved. The loops in are fully developed ; but not so in 7. Medial a andr are clearly distinguished though not always; the first two lines contain several instances where the distinction is maintained, while r is written exactly like the subsidiary à in pērappanmāridum and mamanmäridum in line 3, and in āļvār in line 7. Medial i and ū are sometimes, but by no means always distinguished from i and u by loops, the loop indicating length in i being placed at the end of the left arm of the curve indicating i instead of at the end of the right arm as at present. The longli is best seen in the letters Sri and Vi and in ni in tannir (line 7). The long ù is sometimes indicated by the short u-sign attached to the main letter and followed by the a-sign as in malaiyanuran in line 2 and nurrorupatti in line 6; the regular sign with the loop occurs in Kottaiyar in line 4, müvaridum in line 5, and twice in Vennaiyur in line 6. Though the length of these medial vowels is not always indicated in the inscription, I have added it in my readings where necessary. The letter y is invariably written in the Grantha form as in some of the Uttaramērār inscriptions of Parantaka I and in the Museum plates of Uttama-Choļa. The pulli is not marked. Ligatures are almost invariably in Grantha form; Ua is written in two forms in line 6-Palla and Malla-in the one case, a Grantha la placed over a Tamil la and in the other, two Tamil la-s placed one above the other.
As regards orthography, a tendency to omit is noticed in such forms as ivaga! (lines 2 and 3 and 4). The only other features calling for notice are the insertion of y in miy-pidāgai in line 5.
The language of the inscription is Tamil. The construction of the second sentence (11. 1-4), the most important in the whole inscription, is much obscured by its faulty grammar. It gives a list of the names of some persons involved in treason, and of their relatives, but the first five names in the list are in the nominative case, while the remaining eight are virtually in the genitive as indicated by the possessive suffix idum attached to each of them and by the phrase summing up the whole (irvanaitar) being clearly employed in a possessive sense. Line 4 also contains a similar confusion of case endings.
The object of the inscription is to record an endowment by Araiyan Bharatan alias Vyāļagajamalla-Pallavaraiyan, the son of Nakkan Aravanaiyān alias Pallava-Muttaraiyan, the lord of Vennaiyūr. The aim of the endowment was to provide for the supply of drinking water in a mandapa before the temple in which the inscription is engraved, and for the daily feeding of fifteen Brahmans. The endowment took the form of land, and in the narration of the
1 Annual Report on Epigraphy, 1920-21, part II, para. 24 and Appendix B, Nos. 639, 547, 540, eto.
• South Indian Inscriptions , Vol III, No. 128. While in the Uttama-Caola plates, the letter for is almost a piain vertical stroke without any curve at the top as in the sign for medial long à, in the present inscription the symbols for both of these have a curve at the top, usually open on the proper right side.-0. R. K.)
[The pulli is marked in a few cases : e.g., see mangalattu p-perunguri P-peruo in l. 1, though in the rest of the inscription it is not so.-C. R. K.)
