The main corpus for the Kerala coast. After the Chera kingdom of Mahodayapuram faded in the early 12th century, Kerala in 1200 was a set of chiefdoms (Venad in the south, the chiefs of the central coast, Kolattunadu in the north), and these volumes print the Venad records of the late 12th and early 13th centuries with their dates in the Kollam era, the temple corporations, and the Manigramam and Anjuvannam merchant guilds. The famous Kollam copper plates (about 849) are much earlier and are printed here for the background of the guilds. The evidence for 1200 itself is a handful of records, mostly from Venad.
About this source
- Title
- Travancore Archaeological Series
- Author
- Various (Kerala chiefs, temples and merchant guilds), edited by T. A. Gopinatha Rao, K. V. Subrahmanya Aiyer and A. S. Ramanatha Ayyar
- Written
- inscriptions of the 9th to 18th centuries; the series ran from 1910 to 1938
- Language
- Tamil, Malayalam and Sanskrit in Vatteluttu and Grantha scripts, with English translations
- Covers
- about 800 to 1750
- Kind
- Inscriptions
No Wikipedia article on the series itself was found. M. G. S. Narayanan, Perumals of Kerala (1972, 1996) is the modern reconstruction and is not online. The Kerala chiefdoms of 1200 are thinly documented and their boundaries are guesses.
Where to read it
Editions
- T. A. Gopinatha Rao (ed.), Travancore Archaeological Series vol. 1 (Madras, 1910 to 1913)
- K. V. Subrahmanya Aiyer (ed.), Travancore Archaeological Series vol. 3 (Trivandrum, 1921 to 1923)
- Travancore Archaeological Series vol. 4 (1923 to 1924)
- A. S. Ramanatha Ayyar (ed.), Travancore Archaeological Series vol. 6, part 1 (1927)