Page:The Tamils Eighteen Hundred Years Ago.djvu/18

Rh distinction; there were Tamils living in walled towns and cities, but in some parts of the country they still led the life of nomads and had no settled habitation.

An additional proof of the antiquity of the poems above mentioned may be adduced from the fact that the chief towns and seaports and the foreign merchandise of the Tamil country, as described in these poems correspond exactly with those given in the works of Pliny, Ptolemy and in the Periplus Maris Erythraei. Pliny died in 79 A. D.; and had completed his Natural History two years previously. The unknown author of the Periplus was a native of Egypt, and wrote his book after the time of Augustus Caesar, and before the kingdom of the Nabathœans was overthrown by the Romans. A more definite indication of his date is furnished by his mentioning Zoskales as the king reigning in his time over the Auxumitæ. This Zoskales is identified with Za-Hakale who must have been king of Abyssinia from 77 to 89 A.D. We may conclude therefore that the Periplus was written a little after the death of Pliny, between the years 80-89 A.D. Klaudios Ptolemaios, or as he is commonly called Ptolemy, flourished in Alexandria about the middle of the second century A.D., in the reign of Antoninus Pins, and died in A.D. 163. These authors furnish much interesting information regarding the Tamil people and their foreign commerce. Ptolemy especially gives a long list of the names of the maritime and inland towns. Most of the sea-ports mentioned by him can be readily identified from allusions to them in Tamil poems; but it is not equally easy to trace the position of many of the towns removed from the coast, because Ptolemy had utterly misconceived the form of the Indian peninsula. In his map of India he represents the sea-coast, from near the modern city of Bombay to a point beyond Masulipatam, as a zigzag line running from west to east, and thus effaced the whole of the peninsula. Into this distorted map he tried to fit in the mountains, rivers and cities described to him, both by those who travelled frequently from Egypt to India and by those who visited Egypt from India. The names of the tribes and their chief cities as given by him are, however, wonderfully accurate, and give us some idea of