Sangam Age: Trade, Ports and Tamil Literature

A recurring trap in this chapter is mixing up the Sangam-age Chola chiefdom with the later imperial Chola empire, treating a fact that belongs to one as if it belonged to the other. The Sangam-era Cholas were a minor power among three, ruling from an old river-valley capital, Uraiyur, centuries before Vijayalaya's descendants built the Thanjavur temple; a question that lists "Chola capital" or "Chola founder" among mixed-era options is really testing whether a candidate can place the fact in the right century. A second, equally common trap is matching the wrong port to the wrong piece of evidence: Arikamedu, on the Coromandel coast near Puducherry, is where excavation actually found Roman amphorae, Arretine ware and rouletted pottery; Muziris, on the Malabar coast, is where the Greek and Roman sources actually located the pepper trade. Both belong to this chapter; neither belongs to the other's coast.

The early-medieval-era Cholas covered elsewhere on this site, the imperial dynasty of Rajaraja I and the Brihadishvara temple, ruled from roughly the ninth century CE onward, six centuries after the Sangam-age Cholas this note describes. Treat the two as genuinely separate subjects: one a Sangam-age chiefdom centred on Uraiyur, the other a mature empire centred on Thanjavur that a later, dedicated chapter on this site covers in full.

The three Sangam-age dynasties: Cheras, Cholas and Pandyas

By around the second century BCE, three chiefdoms had emerged in the far south of the subcontinent, in a region the NCERT textbook itself describes as Tamilakam, "the ancient Tamil country, which included parts of present-day Andhra Pradesh and Kerala, in addition to Tamil Nadu." The Cholas, Cheras and Pandyas of Tamilakam proved unusually stable and prosperous chiefdoms, known to us chiefly from the early Tamil Sangam poems themselves rather than from inscriptions or coins of the scale available for northern dynasties of the same period.

The Cholas were centred on the rich Kaveri (Cauvery) river valley in eastern Tamil Nadu, and their oldest capital was Uraiyur, now part of modern Tiruchirappalli. Their antiquity is genuinely unknown; Britannica describes the dynasty as antedating the early Sangam poems (c. 200 CE) themselves. The legendary King Karikalan is remembered as the common ancestor through whom later, smaller Deccan and Andhra families claiming the Chola name traced their descent, and the Chola country of this period, sometimes called the Coromandel, stretched from the Vaigai river in the south to Tondaimandalam (capital Kanchi, modern Kanchipuram) in the north. This Sangam-age Chola chiefdom is a distinct subject from the later imperial Chola dynasty that began with Vijayalaya's occupation of former Pallava territory around 850 CE and reached its peak under Rajaraja I: that story, Thanjavur's Brihadishvara temple included, belongs to a separate chapter on this site.

The Cheras (also spelled Cera, and called Keralaputra in some sources) were centred on the Malabar coast and its hinterland, in what is now Kerala. In the early centuries BCE the Chera region became known to Greek and Roman traders, called Yavana in early Indian literature, for its spices. The exact location of the Chera capital is genuinely debated among historians: it is traditionally called Vanchi, a name associated both with an inland site near modern Karur and with the Malabar coast itself, and the dynasty is better attested through its ports and its chiefs than through a single settled capital. Sangam poems name several Chera chiefs from around the first century CE: Nedunjeral Adan is said to have attacked Yavana ships and held Yavana traders for ransom, and his son Senguttuvan, much eulogised in Sangam poetry, is also mentioned in connection with the reign of King Gajabahu of Sri Lanka in the second century CE, a cross-reference historians use to help anchor Sangam chronology (the Gajabahu synchronism). Second-century CE Chera inscriptions referring to the Irumporai clan have been found near Tiruchirappalli.

The Pandyas ruled the extreme south of the peninsula from a capital at Madura, modern Madurai, or from further south, and are of genuinely unknown antiquity: Greek authors mention them as early as the fourth century BCE, and the Roman emperor Julian is recorded as receiving a Pandya embassy around 361 CE. Pandya kings carried the title Jatavarman or Maravarman, moved over time from Jain patronage to Shaiva worship, and are celebrated in the earliest Tamil poetry. Madurai itself was also, by tradition, the seat of the three Sangams, the legendary academies of poets under whose patronage the Sangam literary corpus is said to have been produced, which is what gives this entire age its name.

Indo-Roman trade

The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a Greek sailor's trading guide of around the first century CE, describes the Malabar coast in terms that make the scale of this trade concrete: "they send large ships to these market-towns on account of the great quantity and bulk of pepper... there is exported pepper, which is produced in quantity in only one region near these markets... great quantities of fine pearls, ivory, silk cloth... and tortoise shell," in exchange for "a great quantity of coin; topaz, antimony, coral, crude glass, copper, tin, lead." Pliny the Elder, writing at Rome, complained in his own Natural History that trade with India, China and Arabia together drained the Roman Empire of a hundred million sesterces a year, a Roman anxiety about the gold flowing east that the archaeological record in south India independently confirms: hoards of Roman coins have been found at multiple sites across the region, evidence, as the NCERT textbook puts it, that "networks of trade were not confined within political boundaries: south India was not part of the Roman Empire, but there were close connections through trade."

Two ports carry the physical evidence for this trade. Arikamedu, on the Coromandel coast near present-day Puducherry, was excavated by Mortimer Wheeler, then Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India, in 1945, and again by Jean-Marie Casal from 1947 to 1950. Wheeler had first noticed potsherds from the site in the Madras Museum and identified them as Arretine ware, an expensive Italian terra sigillata made until around 50 CE at Arezzo; the excavations went on to recover Roman amphorae still carrying wine residue, a Roman stamp, glassware, beads and gems, and a distinctive "rouletted ware" pottery that Wheeler judged, correctly, to be of Mediterranean rather than Indian origin, marking Arikamedu as a genuine Roman trading settlement rather than merely a site that happened to import a few Roman goods.

Muziris, on the Malabar coast, is the port the literary sources actually foreground: named repeatedly in the Periplus and in Pliny's Natural History as the foremost emporium for the pepper trade, and appearing in the Sangam epics Silappadikaram and Manimekalai, which describe wars fought between the Chera and Pandya kingdoms for control of the spice route. A second-century CE document known as the Muziris Papyrus records a single shipment of pepper and other goods from Muziris to Alexandria aboard a ship named the Hermapollon, along with the taxes levied on it, concrete evidence of just how large an individual cargo could be. Muziris itself has never been located with final certainty; excavations conducted since 2007 at Pattanam, near Kodungallur in Kerala, by the Kerala Council for Historical Research in collaboration with the Archaeological Survey of India, have recovered a large quantity of Roman and West Asian material and are widely, though not universally, taken to mark the site of the ancient port.

A third port belongs to the Pandya coast rather than the Chera or Chola one: Korkai, near the mouth of the Tamiraparani river in the far south, was the Pandya kingdom's centre of the pearl fishery, a trade noted by both Pliny and Ptolemy and referred to repeatedly in Sangam poetry itself. Inland, archaeological evidence of a bead-making industry using precious and semi-precious stones has been found at Kodumanal in Tamil Nadu, which the NCERT textbook suggests was among the sites supplying the stones the Periplus lists among Malabar's exports, carried to the coast by local traders before they ever reached a Roman ship. Taken together, spices (above all pepper), pearls, ivory, gems and fine textiles moved west out of these ports in exchange for Roman gold and silver coin, wine, glass and other manufactured goods moving east, a trade substantial enough to leave a permanent mark on both the archaeological record of south India and the anxious writing of Roman authors themselves.

The Sangam literary corpus

Sangam literature is, by tradition, the product of three literary academies (sangams) said to have met at Madurai under Pandya patronage; nothing survives from the first of the three, and the surviving corpus, some 2,381 poems by 473 named poets (with roughly a hundred more anonymous), is ascribed to the second and third. Modern scholarship dates the surviving poems more modestly than the tradition's own extravagant claims, generally to the first few centuries of the Common Era (the NCERT textbook's own timeline brackets the compilation of Tamil Sangam literature to roughly 200 BCE to 200 CE), but either way it stands as the oldest non-Sanskrit literature on the South Asian subcontinent, composed and compiled independently of the Sanskrit literary tradition further north.

The corpus itself has three parts. The Tolkappiyam, a work of grammar and rhetoric, is the foundational text for understanding early Tamil language and poetic convention. The Ettuthogai ("Eight Anthologies") collect the individual short poems: Kuruntokai, Narrinai, Akananuru and Ainkurunuru (all love poetry), Kalittokai (also love poetry, in a distinct metre), and Purananuru, Patirruppattu and Paripatal (heroic and, in Paripatal's case, devotional poetry). The Pattuppattu ("Ten Songs" or "Ten Idylls") is a separate collection of ten longer poems that together paint a fuller picture of early Tamil life.

Sangam poems are classified by theme into two categories that structure the entire corpus: akam ("interior"), tightly conventionalised love poetry, and puram ("exterior"), heroic poetry on war, death, the praise and ferocity of kings, and, tellingly, the poverty of the poets themselves who depended on royal and chiefly patronage. Both akam and puram are further organised by tinai, a set of paired poetic genres built around five landscapes (thinai), each named after a characteristic flower or tree and carrying its own fixed repertoire of associated gods, occupations, birds, seasons and moods: kurinci (hill country, associated with lovers' union), mullai (forest and pastoral land, associated with patient waiting), marutam (agricultural, riverine land, associated with infidelity and quarrelling), neytal (the seashore, associated with anxious separation), and palai, named for an evergreen tree rather than a flower, the arid wasteland associated with elopement and the hardship of journeys undertaken for wealth. The same landscape vocabulary structures the parallel puram genres of heroic poetry, so that love and war, akam and puram, share one underlying symbolic code across the entire corpus.

What these poems reveal about Sangam society goes well beyond the imagery itself. They describe chiefs, distinguished in the NCERT textbook's own account from kings proper: a chief's position need not be hereditary, he draws his support from kinfolk rather than a standing bureaucracy, and, tellingly, he receives gifts from his subordinates and redistributes them to his own supporters, the reverse of a king's usual tax-collecting role. Sangam poems repeatedly describe exactly this dynamic of a chief's generosity toward his dependants: one poem from the Purananuru anthology has a bard describe his patron to fellow poets as a man too poor to give lavishly every day, yet too proud ever to turn a bard away empty-handed, "an enemy to the hunger of bards." This patron-poet relationship, chiefs sustaining a class of professional bards and poets through gifts rather than wages, is itself one of the clearest windows Sangam literature offers onto how resources actually moved through this society, alongside the more famous evidence the poems supply for the era's trade, warfare and courtly life.

Quick revision points

• Tamilakam: the NCERT's own term for the ancient Tamil country, including parts of present-day Andhra Pradesh and Kerala besides Tamil Nadu; home to the Chola, Chera and Pandya chiefdoms from around the second century BCE.
• Cholas: capital Uraiyur (near modern Tiruchirappalli), Kaveri valley; legendary founder Karikalan. This is a separate, earlier subject from the imperial Chola dynasty (Vijayalaya onward, from c. 850 CE; Rajaraja I; Thanjavur), covered in a separate chapter on this site.
• Cheras: Malabar coast and hinterland (Kerala); capital traditionally called Vanchi, its exact location debated (candidates include Karur inland and sites on the Kerala coast). Chiefs Nedunjeral Adan and his son Senguttuvan; the Gajabahu synchronism (Sri Lanka, 2nd century CE) helps anchor Sangam chronology.
• Pandyas: capital Madurai (Madura); of unknown antiquity, mentioned by Greek authors from the 4th century BCE; received a Roman embassy under Emperor Julian, c. 361 CE. Traditional seat of the three Sangams.
• Arikamedu (Coromandel coast, near Puducherry): excavated by Mortimer Wheeler (1945) and Jean-Marie Casal (1947-50); Roman amphorae, Arretine ware, rouletted ware, a genuine Roman trading settlement.
• Muziris (Malabar coast): the pepper trade's foremost port in Greek and Roman sources (Periplus, Pliny); the Muziris Papyrus records an actual cargo shipped on the Hermapollon; tentatively identified with the ongoing Pattanam excavations (KCHR and ASI, since 2007) near Kodungallur, Kerala, though the identification is not universally settled.
• Korkai (Pandya coast, mouth of the Tamiraparani): centre of the pearl fishery, noted by Pliny and Ptolemy.
• Kodumanal (Tamil Nadu, inland): archaeological evidence of a bead-making industry, feeding the export goods the Periplus lists.
• Goods: pepper, pearls, ivory, gems and fine textiles exported; Roman gold and silver coin, wine, glass and other manufactured goods imported. Roman coin hoards found across south India confirm this independently of the literary sources.
• Sangam literary corpus: Tolkappiyam (grammar), Ettuthogai ("Eight Anthologies": Kuruntokai, Narrinai, Akananuru, Ainkurunuru, Kalittokai, Purananuru, Patirruppattu, Paripatal), Pattuppattu ("Ten Songs", a separate collection).
• Poems classified as akam (love, interior) or puram (heroism, exterior), each further organised by five thinai landscapes: kurinci (hills), mullai (forest/pastoral), marutam (agricultural/riverine), neytal (seashore), palai (wasteland).
• Sangam poems distinguish chiefs (support from kinfolk, receive and redistribute gifts) from kings (collect taxes); the corpus is a primary window onto the chief-bard patronage economy of the age.

Once Arikamedu is fixed to the Coromandel coast, Muziris and Korkai to the Malabar and Pandya coasts respectively, and the Ettuthogai and Pattuppattu kept as two distinct collections rather than one, this chapter's port-goods- and-anthology questions stop being an interchangeable blur of unfamiliar names.