The Pandyan Kingdom from the Earliest Times to the Sixteenth Century c5.s1.6

c5.s1.6

Turning to foreign literary sources, some of the earliest references are furnished by the Old Testament of the Bible and the Greek and Roman writers like Megasthenes, Pliny, the author of the Periplus and Ptolemy. These references have been discussed out of all proportion to their intrinsic importance and much ingenuity has been spent in trying to press into service texts which are very obscure in themselves.¹ Then, there are occasional references in old Sanskrit works composed in North India, besides very passing references in the records of Chinese pilgrims which are not very helpful to our present purpose. The Ceylonese chronicle Mahāvamsa contains several references to the Pāndyan kingdom and its affairs, but these must be carefully used as the chronology of the Mahāvamsa still rests on insecure foundations.² For mediæval Pāndya history we get some help from the Muhammadan historians of the time as also from Marco Polo.