Page:Tamil studies.djvu/423

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396
TAMIL STUDIES

regards the order and description of 'sports'. Some of the accounts are conflicting in other respects. The Tamil names of kings are sanskritized and are not arranged in chronological order as will be seen later on. Thus, the Tiruvilayadal Purana, like all other puranas, is a compilation of traditions, miracles and other stories, all jumbled together regardless of any time sequence and without any order. It would, therefore, be extremely injudicious to use them for historical purposes without caution.

The only king who is mentioned in Tamil literature as having performed many Yagas or sacrifices is Palyaga (salai) Mudukudimi Peruvaludi. He was an ancestor of Nedum Seliyam of the Talai Alanganam fame. He must therefore have flourished about the beginning of the Christian era. Nowhere is it laid down that Ugra Pandya conducted any sacrifices; but one Ugra Pandya or Ugra Peruvaludi is said to have attended a Rajasuya sacrifice performed by the Chola king Perunarkilli who lived about the first century A. D. The fourth king in the list is Vikrama Pandya in whose reign the Narasimha temple at the foot of the Anaimalai hill was built. From the inscriptions discovered in that temple, we learn that it was constructed by Maran Kari, a minister of the Pandya king Parantaka or Nedum Sadaiyan in A. D. 770 (No. 7). The age of Manikka Vachakar, who is said to have lived in the reign of the 61st king Arimardhana, but actually in the reign of Varaguna the 19th Pandya king, was the second half of the ninth century ; and the date of Trignana Sambanda has been determined to be the latter half of the seventh. As he is believed to have been a contemporary of Kun or Sundara Pan-