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APPENDIX D.
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cultivate the habit of inscribing on stones and issuing copper-plate grants. This is too large an inference to be swallowed without critical examination. The early Tamils are said to be an intelligent and civilized race with a great deal of assimilating power. Not far off from their land the PAllavas were issuing copper-plate grants and in their own home they had the Brāhnis inscriptions. And they could have easily imitater the example of their contemporaries. The fact that they did not do so is due to want of a proper' developer language of a uniform standard and not to their inability to understand the usefulness and value of inscription. It might be argued that even supposing that Tamil
literary the Sangam works were reduced to writing in activity :
cits probable the period not far remote from the time of date. Jatila varman Parantakan the Sangam scholars might still have handed down orally the innumerable verses. The Vedas, the Upanishads and the epics, one might say, were thus handed down from generation to generation by oral repetition. It is true that so far as religionis poetry is concerned syeh a method might have been zealously adherede to. But most of the Sangam poems treat of love and war and are mostly panegyric in character and there is not much of religion in them. It is therefore hard to believe that the Sangam works intact would have been handed down to posterity in the manner of the Vedas. The conclusion of the
