The Colas c12.78

c12.78

This coincidence of testimony drawn from the early literature of the Tamil country and the *Periplus* on the conditions of maritime trade in the Indian seas in the early centuries of the Christian era is indeed very remarkable in itself. When one considers this in the light of other evidence from Indo-China and the islands of the archipelago on the permeation of Indian influences in those lands from very early times, one can hardly fail to be struck by the correctness of the conclusion reached by Schoff:⁹² ‘The numerous migrations from India into Indo-China, both before and after the Christian era, give ample ground for the belief that the ports of South India and Ceylon were in truth, as the *Periplus* states, the centre of an active trade with the Far-East, employing larger ships, and in greater number, than those coming from Egypt.’ We shall see that, when after a long eclipse, the power of the Cōḷa kings revived in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the sea-faring instincts of the people had not deserted them and that, in the favourable conditions then obtaining, they attempted tasks more venturesome than anything they had achieved in the earlier age.