Page:Madras Journal of Literature and Science, series 1, volume 6 (1837).djvu/201

1837.] written records, and is alike fatal to the extreme antiquity of the events which they narrate. The meagreness and inconsistency of the various sources of information might throw a suspicion upon the existence of the Pandya monarchy at any remote period, did not classical writers bear testimony to the celebrity even of its capital city, at the very commencement of our era. How long before this it was founded we have scarcely any means of conjecturing, but the traditional history of the Chola dynasty records the disappearance of that race, as independent princes, to have occurred in consequence of the marriage of a Chola princess with Vara-guna Pandyan, whom it calls the forty-eighth Pandya king. In our lists, however, he appears to have been the twenty-second or twenty-ninth, and supposing the union of the Chola and Pandya sovereignties to have been thus effected before the reign of and the number of preceding reigns not very erroneous, we may conjecture the appearance of the Pandya principality as an organised state, and the foundation of Madura to have happened, about five or six centuries anterior to the Christian era. Of the events that have befallen the kingdom during the long period that has since elapsed, very few are attributed to remote times, and of them the authenticity may be doubted. Such as they are found, however, in the only records that remain we shall proceed to detail them, omitting the most extravagant fictions, and curtailing the most tedious of those which we select.