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42 raised mountains of bodies before his gates. All his villages I destroyed, desolated, burnt ; I made the country desert. I changed it into hills and mounds of debris'.

And yet the early Dravidians are considered by Dr. Caldwell as the framers of the best moral codes, and by the new school of non-Aryan Tamil scholars as the inventors, independent of the slightest Aryan or other influence, of grammar, philosophy, theology and in fact of every science and art. It is enough for the present to remind them that the earliest grammarians of Tamil were Brahmans, their first spiritual instructors were Brahmans, and their first teachers of philosophy were also Brahmans.

The first Tamil grammarian, an Aryan sage, found the customs, polity and even thought of the ancient Tamils so completely at variance with those of the Aryans that he thought it prudent to leave a description of them for the information of their posterity; and with a view, no doubt, to satisfy the incorrigible and refractory early Tamils and to give them a permanency at least in books, he codified and varnished them with a thin veneer of Aryan religious sanction. These now form the subject matter of the third book of the Tolkapyam.

We have said that the Vellalas were pure Dravidians and that they were a military and dominant tribe. If so, one would naturally ask 'How could the ancestors of peaceful cultivators be a warlike race ?" The term 'Vellalan' is ordinarily derived by