dy decayed and the Pandya capital had been removed to
Madura (_Hist. Nat._ vi. cap. xxiii. 26), famous later as a centre of
Tamil literature. The Chola kingdom, which four centuries before Christ
had been recognized as independent by the great Maurya king Asoka, had
for its chief port Kaviripaddinam at the mouth of the Cauvery, every
vestige of which is now buried in sand. For the first two centuries
after Christ a large sea-borne trade was carried on between the Roman
empire and the Tamil kingdoms; but after Caracalla's massacre at
Alexandria in A.D. 215 this ceased, and with it all intercourse with
Europe for centuries. Henceforward, until the 9th century, the history
of the country is illustrated only by occasional and broken lights. The
4th century saw the rise of the Pallava power,[2] which for some 400
years encroached on, without extinguishing, the Tamil kingdoms. When in
A.D. 640 the Chinese traveller Hsuan Tsang visited Kanchi (Conjevaram),
the capital of the Pallava king, he learned that the kingdom of Chola
(Chu-li-ya) embraced but a small territory, wild, and inhabited by a
scanty and fierce population; in the Pandya kingdom (Malakuta), which
was under Pallava suzerainty, literature was dead, Buddhism all but
extinct, while Hinduism and the naked Jain saints divided the religious
allegiance of the people, and the pearl fisheries continued to flourish.
The power of the Pallava kings was shaken by the victory of Vikramaditya
Chalukya in A.D. 740, and shattered by Aditya Chola at the close of the
9th century. From this time onward the inscriptional records are
abundant. The Chola kingdom, which in the 9th century had been weak, now
revived, its power culminating in the victories of Rajaraja the Great,
who defeated the Chalukyas after a four years' war, and, about A.D. 994,
forced the Pandya kings to become his tributaries. A magnificent temple
at Tanjore, once his capital, preserves the records of his victories
engraved upon its walls. His career of conquest was continued by his son
Rajendra Choladeva I., self-styled Gangaikonda owing to his victorious
advance to the Ganges, who succeeded to the throne in A.D. 1018. The
ruins of the new capital which he built, called Gangaikonda Cholapuram,
still stand in a desolate region of the Trichinopoly district. His
successors continued the eternal wars with the Chalukyas and other
dynasties, and the Chola power continued in the ascendant until the
death of Kulottunga Chol