Lectures on Ancient Indian Numismatics (Carmichael Lectures, 1921) c8.77.2

c8.77.2

If any further evidence is required, it is furnished by the fact, first brought to our attention by Elliot, that these punch-marked coins "have been discovered among the ashes of the men who constructed the primitive tombs known as the Pāṇḍukulis (or Kistvaens) of the South, and unearthed from the ruins of buried cities in excavating the head-waters of the Ganges Canal."[¹] "A large hoard of these coins," says he elsewhere, "was discovered in September, 1807, at the opening of one of the ancient tombs known by the name of Pāṇḍukulis near the village of Chavadi paleiyam in Coimbatore, thus identifying the employment of this kind of money with the aboriginal race whose places of sepulchure are scattered over every part of Southern India."[²] In regard to Pāṇḍu-kulis or Pāṇḍu-kuṛis as they are properly called, Caldwell in his *Dravidian Grammar*¹ says as follows: "It is a remarkable circumstance that no class of Hindus know anything of the race to which these Druidical remains belonged, and that neither in Sanskrit literature nor in that of the Dravidian languages is there any tradition on the subject. The Tamil people generally call the cairns by the name of Pāṇḍu-kuṛis.