Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c25.s15.t1.6

c25.s15.t1.6

Panneerselvam,¹ Mahadevan² and Krishnan³). Sarma⁴ has argued that the language is Old Telugu and that the coin-legends are in Telugu verse. More recently, Ajay Mitra Shastri⁵ reviewed the situation and came to the conclusion that the language of the coin-legends on the reverse is "neither Tamil nor Telugu but Dravidian from which later both these languages separated". Mention should also be made of the recent paper by Somasundara Rao,⁶ a Telugu scholar, who "rules out the possibility of Telugu having been used in 2nd century A.D." According to him, the language is "Tamil or Dravidi Prakrit (Proto-Dravidian) language".