Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c21.s6.1

c21.s6.1

As we saw earlier, though Krishna Sastri and Subrahmanya Aiyer refer to the Bhattiprolu casket inscriptions and their unique orthographic conventions governing the depiction of medial vowels, neither of them really understood how these were related to the Tamil cave inscriptions. The next major advance in this direction is due to Subramanian who authored the first book in Tamil on palaeography in 1938 with an English translation by himself in 1957.² Subramanian did not read or interpret individual inscriptions and confined himself to a general discussion on the palaeography of the script illustrating it with the first published palaeographic chart based on the cave inscriptions discovered up to that time.³ Subramanian was the first to recognise and state clearly that the Bhattiprolu conventions of