History of the Pallavas of Kanchi c9.2

c9.2

Sources of Information and Their Nature.—We may now proceed to construct the order of succession of the Pallava kings mentioned in the various copper-plate charters inscribed in Sanskrit in their genealogical order. This is the period ranging from about A.D. 350 to 600. The most important copper-plate records of this period are those addressed from Tāmrāpa, Palakkada, Mēnmātūra, Daśanapura, Pikīra, Ōngōdu (I and II), Darśi, Rāyakota, Chandalūr, Udayēndiram, Uruvappalli, and the stone inscriptions of Vāyalūr and Amarāvatī. These charters have for their object the recording of gifts of land to learned Brahmans or temples, and only incidentally mention the ancestral history of the ruling sovereign who issued the grant. Like the earlier charters they are not dated in any known era such as the Śaka which might enable us to fix their date with precision; but they are merely dated in the regnal year of the ruling sovereign. These records are almost all of them written in the Sanskrit language in the early Grantha-Pallava script peculiar to the Pallava records, and have been assigned on purely palæographical grounds to the fifth and sixth centuries A.D. The practice of inscribing a part of the record in Tamil was adopted only from the seventh century onward, the Kūram plates of Paramēsvaravarman being the earliest known Pallava Sanskrit-Tamil charter. To these we may also add the four or five important copper-plate charters of this variety belonging to the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries A.D. which also furnish, in the donative part of the gift, a long genealogy of the earlier sovereigns in the Pallava dynasty. These are the Kaśākkuḍi, Vēlūrpāḷayam, Korranguḍi, Taṇḍantōṭṭam, and the Udayēndiram plates. These records enable us to check the accuracy of the information contained in the earlier grants.