The Colas c25.25.3

c25.25.3

the ship-builders of Syria and of Rum (Byzantium) nail, on the contrary, these pieces of wood and never sew them one to the other.'⁵⁵ To-day we can see boats on the Madras coast with planks 'sewn' together by threads of cocoanut fibre. But these are usually of a small size; and the observations of Abu Zaid based on what he saw and heard at Siraf about a.d. 916 on navigation in the Indian ocean⁵⁶ should be no obstacle to a just estimate of the size and importance of the navy of the Cōḷa empire more than a century later. If the Arab writers are too early, Marco Polo comes unfortunately too late, and we are without a good contemporary account of ship-building on the Coromandel coast under the Cōḷas. Ahmad-ibn Majid, an Arab writer of the fifteenth century and author of several nautical works, makes frequent allusion to the opinions of the Cōḷas which he approves or modifies. He must have had before him a specialised nautical literature of Tamil (Cōḷa) origin which he compared with Arab documents of a like nature. This literature must have included geographical tables with indications of the latitude of ports for the use of the mariners of the Coromandel coast.⁵⁷ Of this technical literature mentioned by this and other Arab writers, unfortunately no part seems to have survived.