Early South Indian Palaeography c3.4

c3.4

There have been found so far some sixty label inscriptions in Brāhmī characters of the Drāviḍi type in the districts of Tirunelveli, Madurai, Ramanathapuram, Tiruccirappalli, Coimbatore and North Arcot in the Madras State and Nellore in Andhra Pradesh. They constitute the basic material for a study of South Indian Palaeography in its earliest phases. The first attempt at a study of these inscriptions was made by Venkayya who thought that the natural caverns in which the few inscriptions known then were found were Buddhist and that the language of the inscriptions was Pāli. It was between 1907 and 1918 that more inscriptions of the kind were discovered in different places in the southern districts of the Madras State by scholars like V. Venkayya, H. Krishna Sastri, K. V. Subramanya Ayyar and Radhakrishna Ayyar. A number of these inscriptions were published by H. Krishna Sastri in the *Proceedings of the First Oriental Conference* (Poona 1919). But a more scientific and detailed study of the inscriptions was made by K. V. Subramanya Ayyar in the *Proceedings of the Third All-India Oriental Conference* (Madras, 1923). Krishna Sastri felt that the language of the records was "early Tamil." After these, a few more inscriptions were discovered and all of them were studied by C. Narayana Rao, who concluded that the language of the records was Paiśāci Prākṛt.