Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c20.s15: 1.14 Inscribed objects with Tamil-Brāhmī legends: coins, seals and rings
Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c20.s15
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1.14 Inscribed objects with Tamil-Brāhmī legends: coins, seals and rings
c20.s15.1
Until about a quarter of a century ago, no inscribed objects with Tamil-Brāhmī legends were known other than the pottery inscriptions. The situation has changed dramatically since then and a virtual numismatic revolution has taken place in Tamil Nadu with the discovery of a flood of coins, seals and rings with Tamil-Brāhmī legends. These have been discovered mostly from the dry bed of the river Amaravathi at Karur, the ancient Cēra capital.³ A smaller number of inscribed objects have been picked up from the beds of other rivers like South Pennar and Vaigai.
c20.s15.2
³ I visited Karur for field study in March 1991. I was amazed to see in the glass cases of jewellery shops in the town hundreds of coins, mainly of the Cēras of the Caṅkam Age, not known earlier. I was told that all of them had been picked up from the river bed. I walked along the dry bed of the river Amaravathi and could see several small groups of tribals digging shallow pits in the sand and panning for coins and gold pieces. On an impulse, I asked one of them to dig at a point chosen by me at random. A shallow circular pit was dug to a depth of one metre when water level was reached. Out of this pit came in the next few minutes a square copper coin of the Cēra dynasty, a Roman copper coin and a gold ring made of wire!
c20.s15.3
As in the case of pottery inscriptions, inscribed objects in Tamil-Brāhmī like coins, seals, etc., have also been found outside the Tamil country. Noteworthy among these are the silver portrait coins of the Sātavāhanas with the legends on the reverse of the coins in Tamil-Brāhmī; a silver seal engraved with megalithic symbols and Tamil-Brāhmī characters found in a megalithic grave at Anaikoddai, Jaffna, Sri Lanka; a set of local lead coins with Tamil-Brāhmī legends from Tissamaharama on the south-eastern coast of Sri Lanka, and a unique inscribed touchstone found in Thailand.
c20.s15.4
The appended catalogues of coins, seals, and rings with Tamil-Brāhmī legends (Tables 1.6 to 1.8 respectively) provide a brief description of the inscribed objects, references to the sources and also to the sections in this volume where they are discussed further in the context of the stone inscriptions. As the present study relates to epigraphy, the emphasis is on the palaeographic, orthographic and linguistic features of the inscriptions. Other numismatic data relating to the symbols and physical measurements and specifications will be found in the references cited in the Tables. Most of the legends are in Tamil written in Tamil-Brāhmī. A few of the legends are in Prakrit, and the legend on a unique gold ring from Karur (No. 11 in Table 1.8) appears to be in Pāli; in these cases the script is Southern Brāhmī. Select inscribed objects with Tamil-Brāhmī legends are illustrated in Figs. 1.22 to 1.24.