80 FIRST STRUGGLE FOR THE INDIAN SEAS with them the silver jubilee trumpets. A copper grant proves that they were recognized by the Chera sov- ereign as self-governing communities at the beginning of the eighth century A. D. These prehistoric Jewish settlements formed in the time of Da Gama, and con- tinue to form at this day, a distinctive feature of the southwest Indian seaboard. Even more important were the Nestorian com- munities of St. Thomas Christians, whom the Portu- guese found both numerous and powerful on the coast of Malabar. They took their name of " St. Thomas Christians r from the tradition that the Doubting Apostle had preached throughout India and obtained the seal of martyrdom near Madras in 68 A. D. (al- though the accuracy of the tradition is doubted by some), 1 and they preserved under a broken succession of bishops an early Asiatic form of the faith. Metal plates attest their existence as organized communities in the eighth and ninth centuries A. D. These Malabar Christian and Jewish grants, flotsam of the wreckage of perhaps a thousand years, are written in a long dis- used primitive alphabet known as Vatteluttu of the Malayalam language. The St. Thomas Christians en- joyed a rank equal in name at any rate to the Nairs, and are said, like them, to have supplied soldiers to the coast-rajas. They also held office in the great Hindu court of the interior. In 1442 an Indian Christian acted as prime minister to the King of Vijayanagar the suze- rain Hindu State of southern India. 1 See above, vol. ii, p. 210.
