such veneration as to deserve handing down by rote like the Vedas. Amongst the ancient Tamilians there was, no doubt, a class of minstrels called the panans (பாணன்) more or less resembling the troubadours of mediæval France, whose duty it was to recite songs or lays of fighting and adventure before kings and nobles on festive and other occasions. But most of these men were illiterate mendicants and their poems and songs were in no sense religious. They had no interest in preserving in the memory of the people the heroic tales of temporal power and in transmitting them orally to their posterity. It is thus pretty clear that the earliest literary activity of the Tamilians could have shown itself only after the introduction of writing in South India, which must have taken place long before the fourth century B.C. We shall not therefore be wrong if we look for the foundation of the first Tamil academy or Sangam somewhere between the sixth and fourth centuries before the Christian era.
Having fixed approximately the upper limit of the age of the Tamil academies, we may now proceed to give a detailed history of each of them separately. In order to follow the arguments the reader is expected to possess some knowledge of the history of the early Pandya kings, a brief outline of which will be found in Appendix 1.
Regarding the first academy the following particulars are mentioned in Nakkirar's commentary on Iraiyanar's Agapporul, which, though meagre, is we
