Sangam poetry and the Tamil kings

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.