The Pandyas of Madurai may have ruled, in some form, for two thousand years
Greek envoys, an Indian emperor's rock edicts and the oldest Tamil poetry all mention the Pandyas. The South Indian dynasty is counted among the longest-ruling in history, holding power from roughly 400 BCE to 1618 CE, though its reach swelled and shrank dramatically across those centuries.
The Pandyas were one of the three crowned houses of the Tamil south, alongside the Cholas and Cheras, ruling Pandya Nadu from inland Madurai and the port of Korkai. A Tamil origin story, compared by historian K. A. Nilakanta Sastri to Romulus and Remus, makes the founders three brothers who shared Korkai until two left to build kingdoms of their own. The Pandya emblem was a fish, stamped on silver punch-marked coins.
Outsiders noticed them early. Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador to Chandragupta Maurya, wrote of a Pandyan queen whose realm of 365 villages supplied the palace one day each. Kautilya's Arthashastra called Madurai the Mathura of the south, and Ashoka's edicts list the Pandyas among friendly southern peoples beyond his empire. The oldest Pandya named in stone, Nedunjeliyan, appears in a Mangulam inscription recording rock-cut beds given to a Jain monk. Roman coins and pottery unearthed at Korkai back up literary accounts of a long-distance pearl trade.
Tradition credits Pandya patronage for the legendary Sangam academies of Madurai, and some kings were said to write poetry themselves. The early rulers followed Jainism before turning to Hinduism, and their realm came to include the Meenakshi Temple. After fading under the Kalabhras, the dynasty revived with Kadungon in the late 6th century and contested south India with the Pallavas and Chalukyas until the Cholas of Thanjavur eclipsed it in the 9th.
A golden age came in the 13th century. Jatavarman Sundara Pandya I pushed north to Nellore and took northern Sri Lanka, and Maravarman Kulasekhara I beat a combined Hoysala and Chola force in 1279 and carried off the Buddha's Tooth Relic from Sri Lanka. Then an internal crisis coincided with the Khalji invasion of 1310 to 1311, and losses mounted until a Madurai Sultanate was established in 1334.
Source: Pandya dynasty
