India’s classical Tamil shore may hold 385,000-year-old humans
Tamil Nadu, India’s southernmost state, ranks tenth by area and sixth by population as homeland of Tamil—the first language India recognised as classical. Chennai is the capital. Archaeology suggests archaic humans here more than 385,000 years ago, with over 5,500 years of continuous cultural history.
The name simply means land of the Tamils, and the Kaveri river cuts the state in two before reaching the Bay of Bengal. Finds at Adichanallur point to unbroken settlement for over 3,800 years and carry Tamil Brahmi writing from around the fifth century BCE. At Keezhadi, excavators uncovered a sizeable town whose oldest artefact dates to 580 BCE, with potsherd markings that may bridge the Indus script and Tamil Brahmi.
For roughly eight centuries, from 500 BCE to 300 CE, three dynasties shared the land: Cheras in the west, Pandyas in the south and Cholas in the Kaveri delta. Their ports, including Muziris and Korkai, shipped spices, pearls and silk to Rome and Han China, and the grammar Tolkāppiyam is the oldest surviving Tamil work. Under the Kalabhras, a poorly documented era, came the twin epics Cilappatikaram and Manimekalai and, by tradition, the Tirukkural.
From Kanchipuram the Pallavas pioneered the towering temple gateway known as the gopuram and carved the rock monuments of Mahabalipuram. Cholas based at Thanjavur rose in the ninth century; Rajaraja I conquered southern India and parts of Sri Lanka and the Maldives and raised the Brihadisvara Temple, and his son Rajendra pushed north to Bengal. Marco Polo called the thirteenth-century Pandyas of Madurai the richest empire he knew. Vijayanagara controlled the Tamil country from about 1370 until its defeat at Talikota in 1565.
The Portuguese arrived in 1522, the Dutch took Pulicat in 1609, and in 1640 the British East India Company raised Fort St. George, its first major settlement in India. Today the state has India's second-largest economy, about US$280 billion, draws more tourists than any other state and holds four World Heritage Sites.
Source: Tamil Nadu
