Page:Origin and spread of the Tamils.djvu/37



26 ORIGIN AND SPREAD OF THE TAMILS fine moulded pottery, nose and ear ornaments, glass bangles together with punch-marked coins of the Pallava types of the 8th century A.D. and in an urn at Kalugumalai, Tindevelly District, clay pipes, iron implements and Cola type coins. These graves only show how the old institutions persisted in this land down to the Cola times. Apparently several of these were family tombs as we have in ancient Crete. The genos buried its dead down the ages in the same tomb, burying with them objects which each of the dead loved. Even today in Malabar on the southern side of the houses there is the family tomb where the dead of the family are continued to be cremated generation after generation. This is another evidence of the underlying unity of South Indian culture from the early Neolithic to the Cola times. Comparatively speaking, neolithic Egypt in 4000 B.C. had only knowledge of stone and not metal. The pottery of neolithic South India was already in predynastic Egypt and this enables us to establish the relations between South India and Egypt even in lithic times. According to Dr. Hall it was neolithic Egypt that exerted its influence on the neolithic Aegean Basin. The Minoan culture of Crete was in its turn a development of the Aegean. Thus we see that all ancient cultures are interrelated by mutual borrowings. But all Archaeology and the accounts left by Herodotus have not given us the proper lead as to the actual authors who were responsible for the early culture of Greece and of Egypt. Both have a strong tradition