| |
There were many wonders in the world, they say, such as the pyramids of Egypt, the leaning tower of Pisa, the floating islands of Mexico and the hanging gardens of Babylon. As monuments of human skill and ingenuity, perseverance and energy in the field of architecture, they have always occupied a foremost place in the estimation of civilized man. India has been considered the land of wonders. Its literature is the oldest in the world and its philosophy the most profound in more respects than one. The problems it presents in the field of philology are still more wonderful, embracing, as they do, a field as large as a hundred languages and dialects, yet divided only into two great distinct and separate families called the Southern and the Northern or the Tamilian and the Aryan languages. An old tradition that has been preserved to their day in some of the classical works in this language locates the beginning of its cultivation in the hoary past, far beyond the times when the ancestors of the primitive Aryans set foot on the frontiers of the Punjab, nay, when the Cimmerian nomads were wandering after their flocks and herds in the highlands of Central Asia. Volume Eleven has a collection of various articles, the list of which are: an old tradition preserved, a note on the Sangam periods, the antiquity of Nanjinad and Shenkottah (two Tamil districts of Travancore), Sage Pavanandhi, Dravidian coins, the Kural, a chapter from the Kural, the Tamils in the epic age, Lanka and the Tamil Sangams and Pandiyan coins. This volume has four plates.
|
| |
ISBN : 9788121245739
Pages : 121
|