# Sangam poetry and the Tamil kings
**संगम काव्य और तमिल राजा**

- Canonical page: https://indianepics.online/event/sangam-madurai/
- Chapter: [Gupta and the classical age](https://indianepics.online/chapter/classical.md)
- Track: evidence (archaeology and documents)
- When: 100 BCE – 250 CE (± 100 years)
- Where: Madurai, Tamil Nadu (9.92, 78.12)
- Tags: language, art, trade

## Summary

Tamil poets of love and war compose the Sangam anthologies under the Chera, Chola and Pandya kings, while Roman ships trade at Muziris and Arikamedu.

चेर, चोल और पांड्य राजाओं के समय तमिल कवियों ने प्रेम और युद्ध के संगम काव्य रचे, जब रोमन जहाज़ मुज़िरिस और अरिकमेडु में व्यापार करते थे।

## Account

The eight anthologies and ten long poems of classical Tamil, later called Sangam literature, divide poetry into akam, the inner world of love, and puram, the outer world of kings, war and patronage. A later legend told of three literary academies, the last at Madurai, the Pandya capital. The poems themselves name Chera, Chola and Pandya kings and dozens of chieftains, and describe Yavana ships bringing gold and wine for pepper.

Their date is argued from that trade. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, Roman amphorae at Arikamedu and hoards of Roman coins put its busiest years in the first and second centuries CE, and most scholars place the core of the poems between about the first century BCE and the third century CE. Excavations at Keeladi, about 12 km south-east of Madurai, have found a brick-built settlement and potsherds scratched in Tamil-Brahmi. How early it begins is disputed. The report on the Archaeological Survey's first two seasons there, in 2014-16, proposed the eighth century BCE, and in May 2025 the Survey asked its author to justify that, suggesting the earliest phase lay not much before 300 BCE.

## Sources

- Hart, G. L., The Poems of Ancient Tamil: Their Milieu and Their Sanskrit Counterparts (1975)
- Zvelebil, K., The Smile of Murugan: On Tamil Literature of South India (1973)
- Schoff, W. H. (trans.), The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (1912) — https://archive.org/details/peripluserythra00schogoog
- Janardhanan, A., 'Archaeologist refuses to revise Keeladi report, writes back to ASI', Indian Express, 25 May 2025 — https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/chennai/archaeologist-refuses-to-revise-keeladi-report-writes-back-to-asi-quoting-excavations-integrity-10026841/ (The Keeladi dating dispute)

## Image

Keeladi Archaeological Site. 02. Saif Arash, CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0), via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AKeeladi_Archaeological_Site._02.jpg

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