From an examination of the second class of my sources of information alone, we find that there was a period when South India was under great rulers, who gave the country peace and thus provided the indispensable security for commerce. This period can be shown to correspond to that of the Roman empire from Augustus to Caracalla. After this period we find the country in a condition of political flux. So then we may still find one, at least, of the most potent causes of this commercial decline in the internal condition of India itself. Pliny and Ptolemy do not mention the Roman cohorts at Muziris which the Peutingerian Tables do. The first exploit of the Red-Chera's father is the destruction of the Kadambul tree of the sea. Another compliment that the poets never miss an opportunity of bestowing upon this Red-Chera himself is that the Chera fleet sailed on the waters of that littoral with a sense of dominion and security.1 The Kadambu mentioned above is explained as a tree of extraordinary magic powers which could not be cut down by ordinary man. I rather think from the context that it has reference to a piratical rendezvous of the tribe of people who were known as the Kadambas. This view seems to be directly countenanced by the extract 3 in the note before the last which says in effect that he crossed the sea, destroyed the Kadambu and brought his enemies to subjection.2 If this view is correct, the advent of the said Chera brought along with it security. This would be in conformity with Ptolemy's reference to Aay, who was one of the seven chieftains known to literature as "the last seven patrons." From the body of works known to Tamil scholars as the Sangam works their contemporaneity could easily be established. I find the name Aay a distinctive name of two individuals, and not quite of a family. The

1 Padirrappattu II, 11, 11. 12-13 11. 12,-13 11, 17, 11. 5.6.

1 Puram 128, Marokkattu Nappasalaiyar, on Malayman Tirumudik-Kari.

2 It would be nothing surprising if the Kadambu tree, the country-date or some tree like it had been the tree-totem of this tribe. One tree in particular might have been regarded as peculiarly sacred by the tribe like the famous Oak at Dodono of the Ancient Greeks, or the slightly less famous oak trunk of the Saxons of the days of Char-lemagne. Such trees with the Tamils were called guard trees and cutting them down was an invitation to a war to the death; of the margossa tree of Palaiyan.

Aay must harve been the contemporary of, or a little older than Ptolemy, and the age of Ptolemy would practically be the age of the Red Chera, and the Chera ascendancy. This conclusion only confirms what has been arrived at independently of this class of evidence. The Gajabahu of Ceylon who visited the Red-Chera almost at the end of his reign, ruled according to the Ceylonese chronicle from A.D.113 to 135. Even allowing for the difference between the Ceylonese date of the Nirvana of the Buddha, and that arrived at by modern scholars as Dr. Fleet, namely 60 years, that date for Gajabahu would be A. D. 173 to 193. The Chera ascendancy then would cover the middle fifty years of the second century A.D. Here has to be brought in the Paisachi work Brhat-Katha. Satavahana or Salivahana was the ruler in whose court flourished the minister Gunadhya, who was the author of this stupendous work which stands at the root of all romantic literature in India, Sanskrit or Vernacular, and may be of the rest of the world as well. It was this work that set the fashion for the composition of the romantic epics. The age of the original is still matter under investigation. The latest authority on the question is the Dutch scholar Speyer who would place it in the third century A.D. at the earliest - a date clearly impossible according to our line of inquiry.1 I shall not say more about it here; but only remark that one of the works clearly based upon this, has to be referred to a period anterior to the astronomer Varahamihira, A.D. 533. This work Manimekhalai refers to the asterism under which the Buddha was born as the fourteenth which according to modern computation following Varahamihira ought to be the sixteenth.2 The Ceylon chronicle also deserves to be given more credit than heretofore. So far investigations from different points of view only appear to confirm its chronology.

The date of the death of the Roman Emperor Caracalla corresponds closely to the disappearance of the Satavahanas of the Dakhan. According to the latest opinion the power of the Kushanas also vanished about the same period. In South India likewise the Pandya ascendancy passes into darkness.

This prosperous and flourishing Roman trade with India lasted over a little more than two centuries, as we saw, beginning almost from the reign of Augustus and coming to an end practically with the death of Caracalla. In India also the Kushana Empire in the north and that of the Andhras in the Dakhan and the rule of the Tamil kings in the South come to an eclipse almost about the same time, as the rise of Sassanid power in Persia. What may be the exact connection between the rise of the Sassa-nian power on the one hand and of the extinction of the Indian powers on the other has to be unveiled by future research. It is however clear that Roman commerce suffered practically, because of the rise of this power which interposed itself along the route of Roman commerce overland and perhaps to a smaller extent across the long over-sea route. The Persian Gulf route passed effectively under the control of the Sassanids, who seem early to have exerted themselves to capture the trade of the Arabs and whose efforts had succeeded so far in it that they could extend their voyages of commerce across the whole width of the Indian ocean and venture as far as the Shantung Peninsula in China. While the rise of this power seems to have diminished the maritime enterprise of the Tamils in the Arabian Sea region, it did not actually extinguish it. It left the Tamil enterprise across the Bay of Bengal unaffected although not altogether alone.