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 about twenty other names for this favourite animal, belougingbelonging [sic] to Tamil alone, besides several others for the male animal and several more for the female. The cars were decorated with flags and trappings, (tērchchīlai).

The royal revenue, besides the proceeds from the royal lands, were derived from taxes (vari), tolls, (suṅgam, uḷgu, iṛai), and tributes (kappam, pariśu, tiṛai).

The chief royal occupations or amusements (for in the case of kings, it is difficult to distinguish amusements from occupations) were love and war, both of which formed the subject of innumerable odes sung by the early bards. Love and war were respectively called agam and puṛam, the inner life which one cannot share with other men and the outer life of action which other men can appreciate and admire. The love of kings and other men was of two kinds. (1) Love at first sight, so impetuous as to lead to immediate consummation, called kaḷavu, to be leisurely legitimatized by a formal marriage, (maṇam, manṛal, varaivu, vēṭṭal). (2) Post-nuptial love, called kaṛpu. The course of love, pre-nuptial or post-nuptial, furnished the bards with innumerable incidents fit for poetic treatment and this is the subject of three chapters of the grammar of poetry, called Poruḻadigāram, of Tolkāppiyam, viz., Agattiṇazyiyal, (referring to both), Kaḷaviyal, Kaṛpiyal. The chief incidents of the course of both forms of love, viz., the first catastrophic meeting of the lovers called iyaṛkaippuṇarchchi, their waiting in expectation of meeting each other, iruttal, lamentations for temporary separation iraṅgal, brief and long quarrels and reconciliations, pulavi, ūḍal and kūḍal, and the parting of lovers, piridal, were respectively correlated to the five natural regions, Kuṛiñji, Mullai, Neydal, Marudam and Pālai. The fact that Tamil literary conventions arose absolutely independent of the literary conventions of the Vedic and other early Sanskrit literature, shows that the correlations of the incidents of love with natural regions, peculiar to Tamil poetry, were based on actual customs which prevailed among the Tamil people in the third millennium B.C., and earlier. We can understand how these customs, i.e., social conventions, on which the literary conventions were based, first arose. The romantic scenery of Kuriñji land is the greatest stimulus of love and the opportunities it affords for immediate consummation fans the flame of impetuosity which is the special characteristic of Kuriñji love. Pre-nuptial love must have been the norm in the mountainous region, and the life of the hunter. In the Mullai region, the herdsman-lover had to be separated all day long from the mistress of his heart and hence the waiting of lovers for each other was associated with this region. In the Neydal, the woman has to sit desolate for days together, when her lover has gone on a voyage attended with risks to