The Colas c25.26

c25.26

The king's share in the public administration consisted in the issue of oral orders (*tiruvāyk-kēḷvi*) on representations made to him by responsible officials on particular matters requiring the personal attention of the sovereign; secretaries were always in attendance on such occasions and it was their duty to make a note of the terms of the petition made to the king and his orders thereon, and to transmit copies of such records to the authorities of the central or local administration concerned for necessary action. The time and place of the original petition, the name of the officer who presented it, and even the particular hall or throne where the monarch received the petition were often noted in reciting the order for being recorded in public places, usually the walls of temples. Rāja-rāja, for instance, is said in the larger Leyden grant to have ordered the gift of Ānaimaṅgalam to the *paḷḷi* (temple) of the Śūḷāmaṇi-panma-vihāra while he was sitting in the hall to the south of his palace called Rājāśraya in the outer city (*purambaḍi*) of Tañjāvūr; and the order was written out by a clerk,—*nām śolla nam ōlai eḻudum . . . . Amudan-tīrttakaran eḻuttināl*.⁵⁸ Other instances may be easily gathered and sometimes the same form is adopted in the records of the Cōḷa-Pāṇḍya viceroys, who were invariably members of the royal family.⁵⁹ Most of these examples relate, however, to gifts in one form or another; though it does not seem likely that the method of dealing with other matters differed very much, the very one-sided character of the inscriptions makes it difficult to prove this conclusively.