A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c12.11

c12.11

We have seen that the language of the short Brāhmi inscriptions of the third century B.C. was Tamil, still in its formative stages, with an admixture of words of clearly Sanskritic origin. In the poems of the Śangam anthologies, the Tamil language has reached maturity and begun to serve as a powerful and elegant medium of literary expression, and has already received and assimilated many words and ideas from Sanskrit sources. It also reflects the existence of a fairly elaborate code of conventions governing the portrayal of social life in literature. This must clearly have been the result of a long course of development spread over some generations.