________________
June, 1897.]
MISCELLANEOUS TRAVANCORE INSCRIPTIONS.
143
acceptance of the gift on the part of the temple authorities. In all probability, he was the Brahman manager of the shrine or the head of the temple servants. Neither of Vijaiyûr nor of the Nanchisvaramudaiyar temple mentioned in the document have I succeeded to gathering any information.
It is remarkable that the system of land measurement followed is the one that since the days of Rajaraja seems to have been in use in the Tanjore District. It is in itself a wonderful system.
. 1 1 1 1 It divides a véli equal to 6 acresls into a series of primary fractions
1 24 g 16° 20' 90' and
, then into a further series of secondary fractions being of the above series, and again into a tertiary series of of the second, and so on, so that a kių kil mundiri of a véli would cover
81 nothing more than an infinitesimal portion of space measuring but h a of a square inch. That the lands in Nanchinad must have been surveyed for revenue parposes in this fine system of mensurement sometime before 335 M. E., the date of our present inscription, is proved by the description of the extent of the land endowment in terms of that system. The four pieces said to have been granted ineasured one má which in current measurement would make of an acre or 32) cents or 2 puras of land. It will be curions to know when and by whom this Tanjore method of Revenue Survey was introduced and carried out in South Travancore. It seems to mo probable that it must have been due to some of the successors of Rajaraja, who conquered and ruled over South Travancore and Tinnevelly in the previous century. No trace of this system is discoverable in places nearer Trevandram, nor does it now obtain currency either in the Madura or in the Tinnevelly Districts, proving thereby (1) that even in the palmiest days of the greatest modern Chola power, places about Trevandram or north Vôņid were not subject to foreign sway, and (2) that the Châln power did not last long enough in places to the south of Madara to enable their system of land measurement to tako root in the country.
On the use of the curious word eilir (opposite) in the expression “the year opposite the year 335 after the appearance of Kollam," about which there has been an apparently endless controversy, we shall comment on a future occasion, as in this case there is not the confusing donble year notation which has given rise to it." After the appearance of Kollam" does not necessarily mean after the foundation of a town called Kollam - appearance being scarcely an apt word to designate the construction of a city. It may mcan here nothing more than "after the reckoning by Kollam years came into use." We may, perhaps, note in passing that the king of Travancore about the date of this inscription was Vira-Ravivarman whose name we meet with in the following year in an inscription1' on the walls of this very temple.
II.
Kottar Inscription, 392 M. E. The next record in the order of date is one engraved on the southern wall of a mandapam in front of the Cholapuram temple in Kottår. We have already referred to this shrine founded
15 A good deal of confusion soems to prevail with regard to the unit of measurement in the Tanjore system. Both Winslow and Dr. Holtzsch (see foot-note No. 4, page 92, Vol. I. of South Indian Inscriptions) say that a vili is equal to 5 káni. But the former estimates & véli as being about 5 acres, while according to the table given by the latter it ought to be 69. Here kani, of course, cannot mean the usual fraction of Evidently, the tani which Dr. Hultzsch gives an equal to 100 kuli must have been differently ontimated in Saka 1296, as an inscription of that date, No. 72, Vol. I., gives 82 känis as making 4,000 kulir, i. e., 125 and not 100 kulis per kini. This fact as well as the diverse oxtent that a kuli may cover according to Winslow, from 1 equare foot to a square of 12 foct, would point to the desirablility of sticking to the fractional system in preference to the more modern but less uniform measurements in kini and kuli.
19 See Some Early Sovereigns of Travancore, ante, Vol. XXIV. p. 257.
