Tamil-Brahmi Inscriptions
composition: contested
witness: cave-bed donative inscriptions and pottery graffiti from Tamil Nadu and northern Sri Lanka
Cave-dwelling ascetics' donors, traders, and craftspeople across Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka adapted the Brahmi script to Tamil sounds it was not designed for, leaving the earliest epigraphic evidence presently known of the Tamil language in writing, though individual inscriptions' dates are often disputed.
- Brahmi script adapted with new and modified letters to write Tamil sounds
- cave-bed donative inscriptions plus pottery and coin legends across Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka
- broadly dated late 1st millennium BC to early 1st millennium AD; individual dates disputed
- an epigraphic record of early Tamil independent of, but contemporary with, the Sangam literary tradition
Short inscriptions adapting the Brahmi script, with added and modified letters, to write Tamil names, donations, and short statements on natural cave beds used by Jain and Buddhist ascetics, and on pottery, coins, and other portable objects across Tamil Nadu and northern Sri Lanka. Broadly dated from the late first millennium BC into the early first millennium AD, though individual inscriptions are dated on paleographic grounds that specialists frequently dispute, sometimes by centuries. The corpus documents literacy, trade networks (some potsherds carry personal names also found in Sangam poetry), and religious patronage of ascetic communities, and gives the early history of written Tamil an epigraphic record independent of, though roughly contemporary with, the separately transmitted literary tradition represented by the Tolkappiyam and the Sangam anthologies.
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